Proving The Concept: Chicken or Egg

Listening to pitches from University projects at a recent Yorkshire Concept Fund meeting it is clear there are two schools of thought about what proof of concept means. To a scientist it's that the concept works technically; to an investor it's that there is market demand for a working system. Ideally, you would demonstrate market demand before embarking on a technical development (if commercial success is your primary goal). Equally, without something to show it's often hard for potential users to get excited about a lot of hot air and hand waving.

The most extreme of these I've seen is the search for synthetic blood where apparently the US military have a cheque with quite a few zeros on it waiting for someone that can come up with something that meets their spec (one of the Yorkshire Forward Bioscience Fellows projects). Hence the scientists have quite a clear specification of what would constitute success commercially and they can focus on the science in sure and certain knowledge that if they crack it they are onto a commercial winner. The other extreme is what we see occasionally at Connect where the technology is paper thin but (in theory at least) the brilliant insight or innovation will set the world alight. The only problem is then barriers to entry are equally low so IP protection becomes the name of the game.

In reality most propositions fall somewhere between those extremes and there has to be some give and take. The technologists have to get something operational to some degree in order to demonstrate the propotype (or Version 1!) to potential customers before the latter will be able to get their head around exactly how much it's going to benefit their lives. Nomatter how much we might like to get validation of market demand before spending money on development in most situations the egg does have to come before the chicken and technical feasibility has to be proved before serious commercialisation work can begin. However, getting the right balance between technical push and market pull is project specific.