Some recent (bad) news from VC investments in greentech raise more questions about whether this is the best model for pursuing innovation. Despite its glory days in the halls of the Obama administration in general and the DOE in particular, venture capital is not the cure for all ills. In particular, the factors that make venture capital successful are not always those that make new ventures successful. Understanding the difference is critical for national policy makers, venture capitalists, and scientist-entrepreneurs alike.
The Entrepreneurial Leap
There are three turning points in the life of a new business, pivot points which set its course and shape its fate. These moments hold whether it’s a startup or a new business growing within an established company. These posts are about how to navigate the least visible but most critical of these moments.
Caught in the Mousetrap
At the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship, we built our Entrepreneurship Academies on a simple observation, that the myth of the better mousetrap was undermining innovation.
Recall Emerson's famous line: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” People are obsessed with building better mousetraps. For scientists, this creates a mindset in which the hard work lies in coming up with the idea—usually culminating in publishing a paper. For the engineer, this usually means developing a design, or a model. For the would-be entrepreneur, or corporate innovator, this usually means an extensive excel spreadsheet or polished powerpoint description of the next great idea. And for managers managing for “innovation,” to revive or maintain their business’s growth, this usually means searching for better ideas from inside the company, from among its customers, or from the larger “idea” marketplace.
If I have learned anything while traveling the country, talking to people in companies about their innovation process, and working with scientists from around the globe, it is this: There is no shortage of good ideas. We are waist-deep in ideas, good and bad. We’ve just lost the ability to recognize them, separate the good from the bad, and throw ourselves into building the best ones into real businesses.
The Forks in the Road
If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
—Yogi Berra
In the commercialization of university research, it’s important to recognize that not every research project becomes a new venture—nor should it. For every research project, there is a range of possible outcomes. This range is often lost when federal commercialization policies, universities technology transfer offices, and enterpreneurship programs focus too much on the number of startups launched or the amount of licensing revenue received in a given year.
The Entrepreneurial Leap
This series of posts (finally) puts to words the approach, the ideas, and the tools developed and tested in the programs of the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship.
Our work focuses on the first of three critical moments in the life of a new venture—the entrepreneurial leap. This is the moment (that can take months, or more if not careful) when the original entrepreneurs make the decision whether to start a new venture or not, and take the first steps that, often unknowingly, send them down paths they may take years, if ever, to recover from.
The ongoing series of posts focusing on the entrepreneurial leap can be found by visiting The Entrepreneurial Leap >>
Resources for creating entrepreneurs rather than teaching entrepreneurship
There are several great resources for teaching—and experiencing—entrepreneurship that are converging in wonderful fashion now and worth mentioning.
Yes and No, the yin and yang of innovation
One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Steve Jobs, was that the hardest but most critical decisions he ever made were the ones to which he said “no.” Continue reading
Local company, global solution
MicroMidas spun out of a UC Davis lab when four students graduated in 2008 and, two weeks later, attended our Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy. A few months later, they incorporated and set up their research lab in West Sacramento. It's a great story for UC Davis, which has a vast inventory of research-born technologies addressing environmental challenges yet in need of commercialization.
The MicroMidas team was recently covered by Discovery News in a post aptly titled "Poop Plastic Puts Waste To Work"
Usually wastewater treatment facilities separate the liquids from the solids in a large settling tank, [CEO John] Bissell told me. He and his colleagues presented their innovation at the PopTech conference currently underway in Camden, Maine. The heaviest nastiness at the bottom is incinerated or sent to a landfill or used to grown non-edible crops that are tilled. Not great options. Micromidas can take that sludge and turn 50 to 70 percent of it into plastic by feeding it to their own special microbes.
The team continues to make progress, and continues to demonstrate the (profitable) market potential for bio-materials outside the sexy but elusive biofuels market.
VCs and Greentech
The Role of Venture Capital in Green Tech Innovation
Everyone is calling for a revolution in the ways we produce and consume energy and for the past year policy makers have been investing billions in this pursuit. But, if their investment models are wrong for the green tech sector, their actions will cause more harm than good. For the Obama Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), venture capital financing has become one of the leading models.
Venture capitalists work closely with start-ups to bring new technologies to market. Google, Genentech, Intel, Cisco and others were funded this way, so it seems natural for the federal government to follow venture capital’s lead in identifying and investing in new green tech ventures on hopes these new ventures will have similar impacts.
UC Davis Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy
UC Davis Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy Accelerating Successful Start-Ups in Sustainability
Center for Entrepreneurship’s Five-Day Academy Invites 50 Researchers From 20 Universities Worldwide
DAVIS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–At the invitation of the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship, nearly 50 scientists, researchers and engineers from more than 20 universities have gathered this week for a series of seminars and workshops on how to launch a successful green-tech company. All of the sessions at the Tahoe Center for Environmental Research in Incline Village are open to the media. <<more>>
Andrew Hargadon 