Commercialisation
From Entrepedia: The Entrepreneurship Wiki
Commercialisation refers to the process of developing products using new research and bringing them to market. It often refers to the the founding of a business entity which uses the Intellectual Property of a university generated in the course of a program of postgraduate study. Commercialisation often involves creating a start-up company or a Spin-out which will develop the research and take it to market.
Choosing to commercialise research gives the entrepreneur a competitive advantage in terms of time to market given that it will be bringing cutting edge innovation to the marketplace before competitors have had a chance to adopt and develop the technology. What's more, there is also an advantage in terms of cost because much of the research, and sometimes even the prototype, will have been carried out as part of an academic programme, the business is not required to invest a large amount of resources in developing the concept from scratch; in addition to this, commercialised research will often make full usage of preexisting components (such as freely available open source software libraries) that will form a fundamental part of the finished product.
However, a word of caution: developing the product or service from a prototype which works in the laboratory to a product robust enough to be successful in the public domain is not an easy challenge. Entrepreneurs are advised to ensure that the prototype has been developed thoroughly before it is launched into production as by this time, the fundamental faults and costs will already be deeply embedded in its design.
