Commercialize my research?...

“I am not going to commercialize my research, I still have my dignity!”

This is a rather odd start to a blog or even to the formation of a community to focus on commercialization! But it is a statement that was made to me only a few years ago in a research rich institution in Mexico and there has been similar less direct push back in many other countries and institutions!

The question at the back of my mind was – well – in what way have the Nobel Prize winning scientists of the top institutions given up their dignity while you remain in the bottom of a top 100 list without either a Nobel Prize or any kind of impact on society for all your dignity!!

Not wishing to be too critical or emotive about this, but just to say that there are a lot of cultural barriers to the pursuit of innovation and game changing research that prevents us from fully harnessing and benefitting from them.

In very practical terms we know that unless the proposed innovation can wash its face in terms of funding and profits, it is not going to go anywhere, unless of course it gets paid for through philanthropic contributions or as part of a government project. Apart from these outliers, the rest of the innovations have to be justified by basic economic principles, which then leads us to the need for commercialization – which has been for many years a dirty word and as illustrated – in some places still continues to be so.

In order to better understand the “why”; “what”; “how” and probably most importantly for “whom” we need to build a global community that engages in the conversations about commercialization of research, especially science, technology, engineering and mathematics derived innovations.

We want to hear about these questions, your personal opinions, blogs, rants, evidence based strategies while most of all we do not want to become a platform for selling products! After all we too have our dignity.

As a start, please see this link to a video which has helped me to a double take – the question is – for whom should we innovate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lVYbUIY5JY

While I look forward to curating, editing, arguing and creating links on this topic – I do not own it – the community that forms around it will hopefully drive the agenda and we can then create a community of evangelists, ambassadors, advocates for the ethical and impactful commercialization of STEM based innovations.