Between 2004 and 2009 we were trying to commercialise tech and IP in a VC backed biotech start-up. We made mistakes of course and made poor decisions along the way and we had to learn quickly but the key thing was – there wasn’t a trial run or second chance to get these important decisions right – which meant we had to try and look into the future of how our technologies would get commercialised in complex, competitive and emerging markets.
We soon realised that no matter how much forecasting or strategising we did it still didn’t prepare us for how unexpectedly our colleagues, customers and competitors would actually behave when we started to protect and commercialise our tech!
We needed someone that could pass on their experiences to us who’d been there and done it and understood finance, our IP and technology, corporate funding, law, market dynamics, economics and so on.
We realised that this mythical person just didn’t exist and we could only figure out how to commercialise our tech by just getting on and doing it ourselves. But this meant our own tech and IP commercialisation was an experiment – and so is every IP and tech commercialization journey as it’s every piece of IP is by definition unique. In 2010, we started off on the road to creating something that would allow us to simulate IP and tech commercialisation before making those really important decisions and making mistakes. We scoured the world for an existing product, service or course and we couldn’t find any that did what we wanted it to do so we started creating IPSim.
