INNOVATION – ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING TIMELY

Story Posted: 04-05-08

by Jay Fraser

Having great entrepreneurial vision is often a double-edged sword.  It can lead to breakthrough technological innovations and advancements.  Some entrepreneurs see where they want to go as plain as day, and yet, even that clarity cannot anticipate the way that the marketplace and market forces will affect the outcome.  In those cases, entrepreneurial vision can lead down a path on which there may be no return.

Having market or technology vision is a “gift.”  Someone who has the ability to see trends emerging often has an advantage on the rest of us.  Sometimes, however, this advantage can turn into a disadvantage.  It is a bad thing to have a vision of things to come, if they do not come soon enough.  As in real estate where “they” say that location is everything, in the realm of entrepreneurship, in many ways, timing is everything. 

Nearly all entrepreneurs miscalculate the time it will take for their vision to actually become reality.  When you have your “vision” and awaken in the middle of the night with that epiphany “ah-ha!,” you may not know how much time it will take for you to bring it to market.  Thus, it some people say, “the bane of the entrepreneur is to be a visionary before ones time.”  How much does timing effect the outcome of an entrepreneurial dream and is that dream a pleasant one, or a nightmare?  It all depends.

Business and strategic planners call them “external factors.”  These are the events and other occurrences that can affect your business and the execution of your business plan and that are totally unpredictable and uncontrollable.  They are the issues that crop up each day, and they are certainly the things for which you cannot plan.

In my own management team, we have discussed the concept of the “window of opportunity.”  Is the window open or closed?  Is it going up or is it on its way down?  The concern has been whether our inability to raise the necessary final round of capital to complete our commercialization has doomed us to failure.  Oddly enough though, in our case, despite the passage of time since the “vision struck,” the market (at least in our opinion) has yet to coalesce.  Since that time a number of other technologies in our market space have been introduced and deployed.  Yet, to date, none of them have offered a compelling solution to the problem our technology addresses.  Is now the time for our solution to present itself to the market?

Internally, we have debated whether it is possible that had we succeeded in raising our capital a few years ago, when we nearly had a funding deal completed, and then introduced our product, that the market would not have been ready for our product?  Would we have thus failed by being more timely?  Or is it oddly more timely to have suffered and slogged through the last few years only to raise our funds, hopefully now, and introduce to a market even more conducive to our product?

Our product competes in the homeland security market, and specifically relates to authentication of physical documents and media.  A report titled “The Homeland Security Market Essential Dynamics and Trends” recently published by the Civitas Group discussed the importance of technologies beyond those of the first generation.

The third generation of homeland security solutions utilizes technologies that are still being researched, are explicitly designed to meet contemporary security requirements, and have the potential to deliver substantial improvement to our security capabilities.  This generation is still in development, but is of major interest to the investment community. More advanced aspects of this generation are currently in the process of being integrated into G2 solutions.

The G3 market includes products that were conceptualized subsequent to September 11 and are currently at various stages in the research and development cycle. The most viable technologies in this generation will begin to emerge now and over the next five years. However, the levels of technology emerging from select incubators, government labs and early-stage technology firms is potentially “generation leaping.” This segment of the market is still dominated by small, privately-held companies, technology spin-offs from university or government laboratories, and a select group of research-oriented private entities.

Prospective investors have asked me, “why has it taken so long for you to get to where you are today.”  The answers are numerous.  One of those answers is that “it doesn’t matter at all how much pain or blood, sweat and tears have been has been shed to bring the company to the point it is at today.  It only matters what lies before us now.”  That does not discount the time, effort and money that my partners and I have spent during these years.  Maybe it only helps to rationalize things.  The other answer, of course, is “we don’t really know.”    Only time will tell.

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