2. Commercialization’s Obstacles

Moving from the technical advances described in the previous chapter to commercialization is often rough. Invention is simply the creation of ideas in a laboratory. Innovation is ideas’ wide-scale commercial adoption. Innovators, seeing the opportunities for commercial gain, must bring these two together—that is, take ideas from the laboratory and put them to wide-scale use. The ideas innovators endeavor to exploit are supposed to evolve rapidly through stages of market introduction, growth, and product maturity. However, most ideas do not pass quickly through these stages. Many show initial promise and fail. Others that take off may do so slowly.

The path to commercialization can be tortuous. This chapter illustrates ...

Get The Future of Technology Management and the Business Environment: Lessons on Innovation, Disruption, and Strategy Execution now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.