Idea in Brief
The Problem
Many inventors struggle to commercialize their inventions or discoveries successfully. All too often large companies, investors, or others walk off with the fruits of a scientist’s work.
Why It Happens
Commercial success with a new technology depends on the exclusive ownership of a critical asset or capability. But to create the technology, innovators draw on knowledge from many different sources. Inventors who mismanage that tension often fail to successfully commercialize their innovations.
The Solution
To manage the tension, inventors must successfully avoid the following traps: prematurely disclosing proprietary information; neglecting policeability; failing to demonstrate originality; overrelying on known science; failing to stake out the best territory; mismanaging attribution; and falling into funders’ clutches.
The average adult human body holds about 40 liters of water to support its metabolic processes. Burn victims can lose nearly 37 liters of water a day because of the damage to their skin. Traditional treatment of burn patients involves painful surgery and often a grueling series of follow-up operations. After witnessing a procedure on a severely burned farmer, Lynn Allen-Hoffmann vowed to find a way to help these patients. She embarked on a decade of research and conducted more than 1,000 experiments, and in 1999 she patented a skin substitute derived from normal-tissue cell lines.
