In this episode, we discussed the process (and challenges) of going from invention, to innovation and then ultimately to commercialization.  The question covered:

* What are the three attributes of a great innovation roadmap?

* Why are good requirements so critical for successful innovation and commercialization efforts?

* Can you create metrics that are meaningful for innovation?

* Is the challenges for partnerships different between public and private organizations?

* How does the US stack up when it comes to invention, innovation and commercialization?

Guest: Dr Tom Cellucci

Dr. Tom Cellucci has been a senior executive in both the private and public sectors for over 32 years. He served as the US Government’s first-ever Chief Commercialization Officer, working for both President Bush and President Obama. Tom leads a successful management consulting firm, Cellucci Associates, Inc., based in Cambridge, MA. He has authored or co-authored 24 scholarly books and over 192 high-tech business articles. Cellucci earned a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania (1984), an MBA from Rutgers University (1991) and a BS in Chemistry from Fordham University (1980).

For more, see  www.cellucciassociates.com.

Killer Question:

What are we throwing away because we assume it has no value?

My wife is famous for being a little frugal. She once routed me and our son Logan from Las Vegas to Phoenix to Los Angeles and finally to San Jose because she could save twenty bucks each over the nonstop fare. Kind of nuts, right? But if I’m honest I have the same mind-set in one respect: I am determined to squeeze everything I can out of any idea or opportunity that is available to me. I am diligent about looking at information and ideas that supposedly have “no value” and wondering, “Hey, maybe they do.”

What I mean by this is simple. Just because you or your business has always operated under the assumption that something—be it data, ideas, or scraps from the manufacturing process—is essentially worthless, it doesn’t mean that that assumption was ever, or still is, true. I constantly review the stuff that gets thrown away and ask myself, “Is there value here?”

One of my big breaks was becoming one of the early executives at Teligent, in 1997. Teligent provided phone service to businesses across the United States and in twelve other countries. The core products were voice and data services to businesses. There wasn’t much to differentiate us from our competitors. Basically we were all competing on the same fundamental premise: providing a good, reliable service at a cheaper price. Here’s the problem with that: If there are no significant differences between you and your competitors, you are essentially in a stalemate, until one of you finds a way to differentiate from the pack. So, even as our company continued to hum along nicely I started asking the questions about who we were, what we were doing, and how we were doing it.

I started doing some internal investigating about the information we were gathering from our customers. After a little persistence, I got hold of the complete call-detail records for our network. In the telecom industry, the network throws away any record that isn’t relevant to billing. The result was that 70 percent of the information in call-detail records was thrown away. A customer rang a business, the line was free, the call was answered, and a charge was added to the bill. Great, that’s how we make money. But looking through the full call-detail records, I noticed something interesting: The logs showed not only the ...