By Lynette Dicey
In an emerging economy such as South Africa’s, burdened as it is by almost crippling unemployment, innovation and entrepreneurialism is key.
Innovation has the ability to create the seed of change and if nurtured carefully enough, has the potential to alleviate many of the country’s social challenges in the future. Innovation breeds intellectual assets. An intellectual asset is all very well but its true value is really only displayed once it has been commercialised. Commercialisation is the process or cycle by which a new product is introduced into the market or, in other words, turning an intellectual asset into an asset with commercial value.
South Africa is not short of innovators: per capita our population is more than capable of holding its own in terms of the number of new patents registered each year compared to other countries. Alarmingly, however, the same cannot be said of our ability to commercialise those ideas. Instead, both private and public sector funds are being poured into a myriad of good ideas which never see the light of day.
“Commercialisation is a big challenge globally,” points out Tom Turpen, Founder and Principal of Technology Innovation Group (TIG), an Austen,
12 EDGE | November 2011
US-based company which promotes the diffusion of innovation through commercialisation. “It’s not a well understood concept. Incorporating as it does everything from intellectual property laws to financial risk capital, it’s not a concept that the average inventor is familiar with.”
TIG specialises in introducing a far more formalised approach to commercialisation in two key areas: public-private partnerships for economic development and translational research in healthcare. It grows individual companies, creates and assists incubators, accelerators and innovation hubs, and stimulates the transfer of technology from research institutions to the marketplace.
“Our expertise lies in interrogating the potential of new inventions or concepts,” explains Turpen. “We bring in certain techniques, which while they are certainly not foolproof, do put ideas through a first phase potential testing.”
Turpen explains that misunderstanding the market is one of the biggest obstacles to new concepts being successfully commercialised. As a result of this TIG has introduced first, second and third stage interrogations which not only evaluate the potential of a new concept, but also test the market, ensure the concept is fit for funding and assist with the development of a real prototype. “It’s a systematic process which evaluates the risks, intellectual property, regulatory and technical risk,
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