Hi, I'm Mark Wilson. I'm going to be the professor in this course. And I wanted to tell you a little about myself. I've been a part time lecturer in Simon Business School at the University of Rochester for five years. And I focus on innovation management and entrepreneurship at the, at the fuzzy front end. The early stage of concepts. I've been on campus about ten years however, about one day a week for ten years. I was the first Entrepreneur in Residence to volunteer here. And I sat in the Office of Technology Transfer, it's now called UR Ventures. And I helped professors and scientists, research folks, post-docs, just try to understand a little more about commercialization. I guest lectured. Help them tune up for certain presentations and tried to get some funding. And just very early on trying to understand how universities could maybe play a little more active role in, in proactively licensing anywhere. And including, start up companies. Prior to this or in my, in my other life for 17 years now, I have an outsource new product development company. And we focus on the napkin sketch level. With existing businesses that come in with, with ideas. And our job is to put ourselves out of work, as soon as possible. We need to test the feasibility from a business and a technical, and market perspective, as quickly as possible. And find out there's so many red flags, that this is an idea that no one needs to pursue. Or, it's a pretty great idea. And aligns pretty well with a corporation. So, they should bring this in and make it an official project, as soon as possible. Rewinding even further, I'm, I have a master's in mechanical engineer, engineering from Rensselaer. And I did engineering and engineering management new product development with Baxter Healthcare and Bausch and Lomb contact lens division. So it was bringing new products, new processes forward in manufacturing plants. And, and design and precision tooling, things like that. I was also the Vice-President of Operations for a local $7 million size company. And that lasted four months, a very interesting story. I also was the interim CEO of a MEMs device that tests for DNA detection. It's in that category. That's also a very interesting story. Just raised it's first A round, 6.8 million a few weeks ago. Which is very exciting. The company was started about ten years ago to begin with. So, stayed and researched and did a lot fo grant, grant work and all that kind of thing. Alot of interesting stories about me. But let's talk about you for a minute. I'd like to help you understand if you're, if this is the right plane flight for you. If, if it's a great plane flight, but it's going the wrong place, then you know, you don't want to be on the plane. Here's who I think would benefit from this course. First of all, bottom line, anyone who's trying to understand innovation management. Especially at the early, earliest stage, when there's raw ideas and raw concepts. A kind of strategy of what should we be even pursuing before we get, get started pursuing it. And aligning, aligning the team and the resources. Which I'll talk about in a minute. What kind of ideas? Well, first of all, if you're in the space of information technology, websites, phone applications. Things that can be built very raply, rapidly over a weekend, you can test them out with some people in a shopping mall. At the simplest level, you, you'll benefit less from this kind of course. Just go out and do it. You don't necessarily need to, to, to have a lot of linemen. It's you part-time, and maybe a few other people, so just go do it. We are if, if, your information technology is more complicated, obviously. Then you, you, you might start to need more of these alignment tools. Overall in this class we're, we're speaking about hard science products. Engineered products, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, electronics, alternative energy. Things that overall on average, take a number of years and several million dollars generally at complete risk. To even get to prototyping stage or to queue up and launch. Business to business componentry that's going into other people's componentry, in a variety of industries. And when, when we, when we're dealing with hard science like that. And when it can go so many pathways forward, it makes more and more sense to take, take the time upfront to really align. And understand what kind of innovation you're trying to do. Now, perhaps you're, you're in a leadership role in a research and development area. Or you're in a smaller company that's trying to put some systems around your research and development or business development. Maybe you're a product manager. You've got a little product family and you need to discontinue certain products or ideas. You need to try to bolster other new ideas and get them moving forward, faster. You might be, a, want to be entrepreneur. You would like to try being an entrepreneur right in your own garage or your basement or your office, whatever it is. And you tried to take a more proactive role to that. Rather than just jumping in with one idea. You'd like to step back and decide which idea should you really roll the dice on, right? Because you don't get too many chances as a garage entrepreneur. Another area where alignment really is often lacking. And also somewhere where the stronger systems that we see are in funding and investing. So if you are a business angel. You have no shortage of people coming to you, saying they've got a great idea, it's going to change the world and it's phenomenal. Venture capitalists, especially if you're starting a new fund. Really trying to align as to where are we going to play. What are the right ideas for us? It doesn't mean it's not a bad, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It just might be. A bad idea for, for you. Last area I'd like to highlight is very exciting and very new. And taking, and that's in social entrepreneurship. And taking these same types concepts into the social change area. If you're, if you're starting a foundation, you want to help the world. You want to improve the world. No shortage of phenomenal ideas are going to be knocking on your door. And, so, it would be helpful to set up a bit of a system, to say, how are we going to decide where we're going to best use our money. Where our money is best used. Or even if you're specializing in, in an area of education, or fresh drinking water or solar power. There's still no shortage of renditions on how you might move forward. What kind of technologies you're going to deploy. Business models on how you're going to deploy them. Regions where you think your, your ideas are going to, going to help the most. So overall, this is a class that's going to share with you a couple tools that help with innovation alignment. And number one, you need to align yourself. You need to have some introspection. You need to ask yourself, why am I innovating? Am I being told to innovate by my boss? Do I want to innovate? Do I, o I want to be an entrepreneur? So you need to in, to have some introspection. To ask yourself, what is your own innovation creed? You also have to think about your team. The people who are helping you, or might work with you or work for you. And to what extent do they need to be aligned and motivated as to, to where you're going and why you're going there. And the kinds of ideas that, that are priorities. And the kinds of ideas that are going to be put on hold and you're not going to be able to look at them. Next, who's going to grade your success? You know, who is saying whether you innovated correctly, or not? And to what ext, what are your boundaries around innovation? If you're doing a start up company, and you're risking your own money, your family money, your family time. Do you have a spouse, family, friends, significant others, that are in your life? That might actually feel more comfortable if they saw that you were deploying some kind of a framework around this step that you're taking. Do you just have a blank check to do this for as many years as you want? Or are there certain boundaries that are guiding your pathway forward? On the corporate side, any number of, of course, stakeholders that you need to align with. With board members. Boss, boss' boss strategy, strategic direction of the, of the company. And that's how you're going to be measured for success on your business development. Say you're, you're Vice-President of Business Development. You've been handed a relatively blank piece of paper. And someone, somewhere is telling you, go. You need to grow us a whole new division. And you've got two years to do it, or whatever. So, that is where the alignment of ideas really, really comes into play, where it's really beneficial. Obviously, there's a lot of reasons that ideas don't succeed on this long journey. But one of the ones right up front, is people haven't really taken the time to figure out where are they? You know, where are they trying to go? The two tools that we're going to talk about. First one, primary, the primary tool is called an idea filter. And, it really just is a matrix looking at factors of why ideas tend to fail. So that you can look at why your, why ideas you're looking at struggle or would do well in that area. You're going to customize it with certain weights as to what's important and criteria as to how you will evaluate this. And behind that idea filter is this other tool called an innovation creed. Which, which really just says, at the very high level,. You can think of it as a mission statement. That focuses really just on the project of innovation. What are the very most important aspects of innovation that jump to the top? That are going to drive you as you look through a whole bunch of ideas.
