Commercializing Management Science

Universities around the world make some of their money by commercializing the results of their research. A professor has a scientific breakthrough, a grad student develops a technology based on that breakthrough, and a company spins off to commercialize that technology. It happens in the hard sciences all the time, so why not the soft sciences too?

Commercializing Management Science is how I've always thought about what I've been doing since business school. In recent years, the academic leaders of Innovation Science, a sub-field under Management Science, have produced scientific breakthroughs that have advanced our understanding of how innovation works. Professor Eric von Hippel discovered Lead User behavior, Professor Henry Chesbrough discovered the Open Innovation phenonmenon, and Professor Clayton Christensen discovered Disruption Theory and the Jobs-to-be-Done framework. These discoveries are the scientific underpinnings of the technology powering my company's products and I owe great thanks to these fathers of Innovation Science for their contributions. Thanks guys!

Soft sciences that focus on understanding human behaviour are gaining more and more credibility as legitimate scientific fields. I'm proud to be helping the cause by showing that these scientific fields also have technology based on their breakthroughs that can be commercialized and put to good use by industry.

Designer genes

In high school I interned at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs on their Human Genome project. The project, along with others like it, aimed to sequence the human genome. It was estimated to take over ten years and it ended up taking about that long.

One project I worked on was: Adaptation of Commercial Robot for Genome Library Replication. What a cool job for a geeky teenager. I mean programming a robot to assist in one of the most important scientific initiatives of our time, how cool is that!?

Anyway, now that the human genome has been sequenced it is beginning to enable what some people are calling Personalized Medicine. Imagine if drugs were tailored to match your own genetic profile? That's what Personalized Medicine is all about and it wouldn't have been possible without the incredible work I did in my spare time as a high school student...just kidding.

Seriously though, I was thrilled the other day when I bought my first product based on the the human genome project. It's a gene analysis kit for detecting your genetic susceptibility to heart disease. You scrape the inside of your cheek 20 times with a swab and sent it away to the company for their analysis. Then they send you a report. I guess it seems cool and I'm thrilled to buy a product based on this emerging science but do I really want to know? Either it's going to tell me I'm susceptible and I'm going to feel even more obligated to live a healthy lifestyle. Or it's going to say I'm not susceptible and I'm going to slack off and end up getting sick from an unhealthy lifestyle.

Oh well, when it comes to innovative products I have a hard time saying no. So here goes...scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape...