What determines the pace of commercialization?

Last week PharmaStrategyBlog linked to a Business Week article on “The Failed Promise of Innovation in the US”. The article argues that delayed technological innovation is partly to blame for the current economic downturn. I disagree, but found the article thought-provoking. Funnily enough, several of the examples of “failed” innovation fall in areas I’ve touched on in my life: MEMS, biotech, and tissue engineering. But what does “failed” innovation mean? What failed? One theme from the article is that, in each case, the technology was much further from commercialization than originally thought. For example, the early struggles of a tissue-engineering company, Organogenesis, highlight the mismatch between expectations and reality:

“This is something no one had done before,” says MacKay, who at the time was working for Novartis (NVS), then the marketing partner for Apligraf. “The way to commercialize this type of technology was more difficult than initially anticipated.”

A theme not mentioned in the article is that all of these “failures” involved making physical products, in contrast to a dot-com-type company (e.g., Google) where the infrastructure and hardware were in place at launch. Novel physical products may need novel manufacturing systems. Just because someone has invented a great new gadget, doesn’t mean that someone has also invented a machine to make that gadget in a cost-effective manner. And to top off these difficulties, when it comes to areas like biotech and tissue engineering, working with living organisms can make outcomes notoriously unpredictable.

Related posts:

1. Natural technology evolution vs. failed innovation
2. Technology Review investigates the slow process of microfluidics commercialization
3. How commercializable is microfluidics research?
4. Hard vs. soft solutions: the retinal prosthesis
5. Starting with the solution vs. the problem