How does your product or service differ from those currently offered in the marketplace?
It is one of the most understimated, yet, ‘revealing’ questions of an investor pitch.
Granted you could do the ‘research’ yourself with your best educated guess, the truth of the matter is, if you are building a technology based product and don’t have 3 letters behind your name, better make sure someone on your team does!
Having doctors and research teams available to validate ‘the uniqueness‘ and ‘competitive value add(s) of your project is extremely important to startup teams and tech entrepreneurs long term sustainability and competitiveness in the global marketplace.
While I believe that for the most part, in Chile, this is understood by the ‘powers that be‘, it seems that the miscommunication comes in the transfer of this message between the incubator/sponsoring organization and the project they are supporting. As a result, startup founders and tech entrepreneurs are not able to take full advantage of the benefits that being connected to a university based technology incubator potentially brings.
PhD’s and research teams are essential to the long term success of your startup team because they can measure the complexity of your product and help determine angles to make the product you are designing and developing difficult to replicate by your competitors. Their validated research will prove important when determining if your product (or process) can ultimately be patented/licensed etc., thus further raising the valuation of your startup.
Bottom Line: A PhD Helps You Protect Your A$$ets!
Think back to August 2011, when Google announced that it had purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion USD. The following is excerpted from an article posted on TechCrunch.
In a blog post, Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page writes that Google has acquired Motorola not only because of its strength in Android smartphones and devices, but also for being a “market leader in the home devices and video solutions business.”
It’s also a move to build up the company’s patent portfolio, he adds, as it will “enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies”.
According to Motorola Mobility’s website, the company holds approximately 14,600 granted patents and 6,700 pending patent applications, worldwide, as of January 2011. Update: You can find updated numbers on this – based on the conference call – in our follow-up post.
Find this information useful but still need more support in making sense of it all and knowing how to apply it to your startup venture?
¿Eres AndesMade?
Get IT Now with ‘AndesMade’ bilingual startup coaching program.
This immersion based training program (3-6 months) offers entrepreneurship coaching + rapid prototyping in Spanish and English for bad ass Chilean startup founders, tech entrepreneurs, designers and developers looking to internationalize their startup.
Sign up on Soy AndesMade to learn more about our next series of classes launching this quarter (Quarter 1 2012). Our international advisory and mentor network includes seasoned Silicon Valley based startup founders along with top developers from Google, Skype’s first DB architect and PhD’s amongst many others.
Image courtesy: Cartoon World/Cartoon Network
