From bench to business.

S o you have a hot discovery, the paper has been published,and the patent has been filed.You may even have discussed setting up a business venture to exploit this advance with your University’s technology-transfer office.But what are the chances of commercial success? The odds are seemingly stacked against you.Even in biomaterials — a field with a long history in technology transfer — less than 2% of new scientific ideas make the transition from the bench to profitable business. Can you hope to buck this trend? A better understanding of the many paths to commercialization is one step in the right direction.This is not a formula for predicting success — far from it — but taking a critical look at your innovation and understanding its most likely route to the marketplace is essential before you seek investment. Academe, government and industry are under increasing pressures globally to justify their expenditures on research by linking scientific findings and technological advances with the generation of products leading to social benefits and economic growth. Consequently, there has been an increase in studies into the seemingly random process that leads from scientific discovery to commercialization. This has resulted in a realization that there are multiple paths from science to product. In the case of materials science, some of these paths are different from other fields.With the advent of wider public and industrial interest in nanotechnology, it is even more important to understand and categorize different types of innovations or advances to enable a more robust and swifter commercialization process.