Navigating the ‘Valley of Death’: an Investigation of Which Marketing Competencies Lead Toward Successful Technology Commercialization

Abstract

Government sponsored programs organized to support science research have placed very little focus on supporting the mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of developed technologies from the lab to the market. The Small Business Innovation Research program is one such initiative with the historic mindset that if a technology is good enough, the market opportunity will organize around it. As a result, government departments have not used the market viability of a technology as selection criteria. This has led to uneven success for the commercialization of technologies supported by SBIR grants. We present the initial findings of a longitudinal empirical study that examines which components of marketing competence may allow SBIR grant recipients to negotiate the transition from the lab to successful commercialization of their technologies