The Journey to Impact: Common Questions from BU Researchers
Rana K. Gupta formerly served as director of faculty entrepreneurship at Boston University. He helped BU researchers bring technology and other research breakthroughs to the marketplace to increase their impact through programs and workshops, one-on-one consulting with faculty, educational resources, and community building among BU innovators.
In February, BU Technology Development brought together eight BU PIs for lightning talks about their paths from invention to market to impact in The Innovator’s Journey: Embracing Creativity & Discomfort in Pursuit of Impact. You can watch the full recording here.
Prior to their presentations, I interviewed each of these PIs, and asked the same set of questions that I hoped would resonate with other researchers and practitioners. BU has the mission to create a positive impact on society, and each PI, doctoral student, postdoctoral scholar, medical student, and resident (“researchers & practitioners”) has their own objective with respect to that mission. Thus my questions focused on the PIs’ personal journeys as opposed to their specific ideas or technology innovations. This was done to highlight their journeys, challenges, discomforts, personal motivations, and paths they’ve taken to achieve their desired objectives. I’ll post my interviews with each of these distinguished researchers in future blog posts.
As part of this conversation with the BU Researcher & Practitioner community at BU, the audience posed a series of questions during and after the presentations about how BU supports innovation. You’ll find the answers to those questions below, and more to come from this rich conversation in the coming weeks.
Rana, I have an idea that I’m excited about, and I want to get this idea into the hands of the people it could help. What are my options?
Before we jump into options, the very first question I always ask someone with an idea or invention is, “What is your objective?” By first understanding the objective one can then begin to consider the path that can help them achieve this. The paths that we choose to pursue are defined by that objective. There are four simple paths we’ve outlined on the Research Support website. First there’s the bread and butter of all researchers: publication. A seminal paper can bring recognition and have a huge impact on how people think about a topic. There’s industry collaboration, where you work directly with a corporation on projects of mutual interest. There’s licensing, where you license your technology or idea to a third party who will take it to market. There’s a start-up, where you start your own company to market your technology or idea.
Those are the four simplified pathways, and each have a truly infinite number of approaches within them. So your objective is important as it helps us narrow the options for your life and work. Because of this weighty notion of entrepreneurship, people think there’s a great roadmap in the sky they have to follow. I help them understand that they build their road, based on their objective.
What else should I be asking if I want to bring my research to the marketplace?
The second question I always ask is whether there’s a need for the idea or invention. Recently I met with a researcher who said, “I would use this technology, and if I would use it, everybody would use it.” And I had to say, “Hold on. That may be true, but it may not be. Let’s go interview some potential customers to find out.”
Thinking about market need and customers in this way, and how an idea can impact their lives, is a new concept for many researchers. Researchers think about BIG problems to solve. I ask: who, what person, with what title, will adopt your solution? This exercise can be uncomfortable, especially when the researcher finds out no one actually wants that solution. So in my conversations with investigators, we talk about how to get started. For example, we offer something called the Catalyst program, where we connect you with MBA and doctoral students, who interview potential customers for the product you’re considering bringing to market. The process introduces you to potential markets and customer needs in that space. We also have the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Spark Program, in which faculty learn how to interview customers directly. As the NSF famously says, “Don’t work on something no one wants!”
These are programs that are designed to help researchers gather the information they need to make their next moves. The first step is almost never filling out a form or filing a patent – that’s a common misperception.
What is your office’s role in marketing technologies, identifying potential investors, and getting a start-up company off the ground?
My role is to assist BU researchers and practitioners who have an interest in achieving their objective to create a positive impact. While BU Technology Development does offer some limited technology marketing (through a portal page where we post BU’s licensable technologies), we focus on educating and supporting BU’s research community. Specifically, we offer a growing menu of programs and resources to help PIs build a skillset that will allow them to navigate the world of business to achieve their personal and professional goals.
For startups in particular, we offer programs and resources such as workshops, tutorials, mentors, and advisors to give PIs the tools and skills they need to start their company. We’re happy to help find investors, but it’s the PI’s responsibility to lead the effort. We can help with the pitch, but the PI should be knowledgeable about their market, customer base, value proposition, how the company will make money, etc.
What’s the difference between an invention and an innovation?
For our business purposes, an invention is a new idea, while an innovation is an idea that has been adopted in the market: Invention + value + adoption = innovation. To get to the point of innovation, you must: 1) identify the need and customer, 2) develop a solution, and 3) create and execute a plan to deliver that solution to the intended customer. One cannot “innovate” in a vacuum. One can brainstorm, be creative, and invent but innovation happens after the intended audience adopts that solution. In other words, a new idea is not an innovation; it’s a new idea.
What barriers do you see to innovation, and how do you work through them?
The biggest barrier I see is an unwillingness to do the hard, unglorified work of finding the need or most valuable problem to solve. As humans, we tend to focus on touting our ideas rather than assessing the need and value to a particular customer and market. This is why most ideas fail. Overcoming this barrier requires a real willingness to ask questions and listen actively to potential customers.
I am curious about how to make an impact in [education/mathematics/theology/etc.]. Can you give guidance on how to pursue commercialization in my field?
Always start with a need. This is why we offer programs such as Catalyst and Spark. Even with a simple idea of something you may want to have an impact on, you can start with customer interviews to learn the “pains” of the very people you wish to help. With an understanding of the needs they have, you can begin to formulate a solution that they will adopt. Our NSF-funded Spark Program will teach you how to engage in customer discovery to identify needs and develop solutions to address them. These combined efforts are needed if you wish to create an impact in the field of your choice.
You also mentioned industry collaboration as a possible path to impact. How does industry work with academic researchers?
There are many ways industry will work with academic researchers, including:
- Gifts to support promising research or faculty members that align with the company’s strategy
- Licensing a researcher’s intellectual property
- Accessing a researcher’s or lab’s unique capabilities
- Collaborating on sponsored research
- Investing in a researcher’s start-up company
As with any path to impact, you will want to narrow the options available to those that will help you achieve the personal objective that matters to you. To learn more about collaborating with industry, visit the Research Support website or reach out to the Industry Engagement team.