Jacques Cousteau is one of my fondest memories growing up. My father was always watching this guy that would go to the ocean and like find stuff. He was basically as good as Sean Connery to me, sure he wasn’t Bond but they guy was always in the ocean finding stuff.
Sometimes I think about my role at university, this explorer, looking for technologies in the sea of Ohio State. I don’t have a cool retro mini sub like Jacq had but the mission is relatively the same, go seek, find, discover and report back to base. That mission is one I love at the Technology Commericalization Office.
Course its not all gravy. Much of Jacq’s life is picking thru shells on the sea floor and pulling up the really really special things. But these days, everyone has their special thing, who are you to say this shell or that shell doesn’t matter? Well there are tools, but I like to fall back on the basics- what’s the problem you’re solving, what’s the solution you’ve realized, what’s the dna of what you’ve injected into the big idea to realize it and tell me a story of 5 people who love it and why? Others will beat ya over the head on competition, and market size, value projections, which are actually all valid, but to me, momentum trumps everything. But SPEED has a cost, it cares not about what you personally want, it only speaks to traction in the market, a market where consumers jump from brand to brand faster than bees on flowers in a field. Loyalty only occurs when you’re really really really good.
Jacq spent alot of time on the bottom of the ocean before dishing out some classic finds. Life at TCO is similar. In every office theres a battle plan on the wall, ideas and techs to be something larger, greater, hopefully realized. People often think we’re sitting on this trove of treasure but its really more like a ocean bed of shells, some are more enabled to get to market to win than others. I love an underdog though. But an underdog product with no customer or value perception is a project, and thats ok, cause projects + love = realization in a larger level one day.
You do see something however, startups are going mainstream. They’re in the diet of nearly every magazine and journal. Startups, creating things we see as hopefully super awesome is happening everywhere. Whats really crazy is that just doing and starting is starting to be the same thing. The danger is that doing is doing and that starting up, well that implies alot more and assumes alot more. But many folks are actually just doing but feel they need to be starting up to say their doing. (thats deep!) What happens is that they should be just doing but instead they get caught in the trap of “well to do i must be a startup, and startups get money to do, so where’s my check?” and it doesn’t quite work like that. I always think every check i take is another commitment i need to fulfill. Before seeking a check be sure you can tell the story about how without it you still rock. Its not to say you wont get it, but in todays market, money is rarely the reason why you didn’t succeed. Ohio is starting to shape up however, more and more capital is being injected into the sphere of startups with momentum. Every day I work to craft and shape my focus to enable OSU related startups to rock in that respect.
Its a great time to invent, its even a better time to validate- that is our greatest asset at Ohio State I think. The ability to invent, everyone can do, the ability to test and validate that big idea in research, applied to projects, enabled by the young minds that go on to be work force of tomorrow, what a huge massive and awesome opportunity.
I often think about the seriously tasty.. and here’s what I think is seriously tasty and needs to get to market more at Ohio State. Consider these my Jacq Cousteau learnings after 2 years here…
- Validation. We don’t give ourselves as much credit as we’ve earned when it comes to our expertise and validation we apply to the process of ideas. Validation in my mind, is one of the next great frontiers for Ohio State. Our ability to address, quantify, improve, validate and test across 13 colleges, with multiple focus areas not mention a world class Cancer center and epic sports department, holy cats people, thats awesome.
- Content, content, content. The university sits on a massive treasure trove of information. We create a ton of content to address well, just about everything. We craft the narratives that teach the students of tomorrow. We create alot of content. All that content given its exposure to students and “practice” has inherent momentum attached to it. The university carries with it scale, it carries city like application. We are a small city, you ever think about that? Pretty wild really. Content falls under varied tiers however in terms of commercialization, thats short of saying its not all up to TCO, in fact most is out of our reach. But the opportunities to funnel, shape, and wield that information and form game changing applications around it however are in our wheel house.
- Practical Applied Engineering, ok I just fudged that a bit. But the gist is that our engineering applied to context, that holds value, equals win. When we solve our own problems at Ohio State we create tangible living assets that are screaming to go to market. While many are looking for the absolutely newest thing on the planet, I’m in the halls of obvious looking at folks who used x thing for as long as they could until they said heck with it and re-engineering it and made it 1% to 200% better. What’s great about those innovations is that they all have a strong compelling narrative around them. They breathe. They have stories. I love stories of suck. “Yeah we used x, it sucked…” thats awesome, tell me how and why that thing sucked. Just about everything thats ever sucked has come from a company, a company that probably did a fair job at getting people to buy it, course then it sucked. But the lesson here is that proven sales channels exist, known customers are there, new innovations on top of known markets mean momentum just a few steps away from realization. The completely new thing still has a chance to get to market but its harder, it has no other thing to compare to, it may not even have a customer that knows thats a problem they have. I love ideas that are just 5-20% better than the now, huge opportunity- BUT you have to go FAST.
- Context Gold Rush. The university represents a context gold rush. I always love to retort to those that ask me “well what does the university offer?” (in terms of technology) and my response is always “you name it”. We have everything. Really we do. And even if we don’t, we need to stick with the mantra that we do. Why? Because we do. Seriously, ideas are less about specific constructs of enablement and more about a recipe of win. You need a dash of this, a bit of that, its a mixture and universities rock in this department. We sit on a massive bed of context. If we were really crazy, we’d roll into any department at the med center and just for 1 day focus on next, we’d yank out about 40 ideas, 10 of which are really whole new companies. Then the beauty is that we actually have the bits and dashes of expertise to validate those notions, we need more help of course but the context of “could that work” is there. We likely have tons of software and algorithms to apply to the venture to enable it, to refine it, and of course we have the sponsored research power to further enable it.
We are entering an interesting time both in our enabled society, radically net-connected youth and the dawn of everyone-can-ware. Should be fun!