We Connect you to the Innovation Highway

At James Gollub Associates, we provide that crucial connection between innovation and the marketplace – an Innovation Highway that empowers sources and stakeholders to realize the value of their research and helps markets find some of the most important and promising innovations.

Capturing the economic value of innovation is one of the primary challenges facing universities, institutes and entrepreneurs who all too often end up merely subsidizing the economic opportunities of others downstream. The Innovation Highway provides innovators and stakeholders the wherewithal to become powerful economic generators. Our goal is to assure our clients benefit at every stage of this process, reaping triple bottom line benefits, through the capture of economic value from the growth, development & deployment of discovery.

Harnessing Discovery to Generate Seeds for Growth

Maximizing the economic impact of innovation begins with the identification of a university, institute or laboratory’s most distinctive science assets. We first help you identify and evaluate your ongoing research in the broader context of research being done by your competitors and assess the downstream value of your most distinct and potentially valuable intellectual property. This leads to the next step, creating a “roadmap” to focus and intensify research so that you produce innovation feedstock with the highest development potential. Doing this may require establishing new mechanisms for concentrating research—that is new forms of translational research, research consortia and contract R&D capacity. In particular, organizing new “convergence” themes for research is increasingly a key to creating and sustaining the continual production of innovation feedstock with the highest potential for commercial success.

Proactive Development to Grow Strategic Solutions

The next stop on the Innovation Highway is creating the mechanism to harness the potential of your innovation feedstock in the marketplace. Many of the clients who come to us have relied on responding to corporate interests and encouraging reactive entrepreneurship to capture the value of innovation arising from their translational research. But, as commonplace as those practices may be, they only capture a fraction of the value of those science assets in the marketplace and surrounding economy. We take your innovation assets beyond that process, and build new proactive development corporations, designed to the individual needs of each client and the community in which they’re situated.

These new entities we form generate concerted economic value from translational research results and other sources, without conflict with faculty or the private sector. In fact, ultimately, innovation sources—faculty, university and innovation stakeholders—the state, community, enterprise and industry all reap benefits – making it a win/win system.

By creating and embarking on this Innovation Highway, we significantly expand the quantity and quality of pre-venture as well as venture stage enterprise, while freeing researchers to focus on their primary purpose.

The bridges we build between innovation generation sources and stakeholders provides a steady stream not only of new solutions to problems, but returns to all parties as well as economic opportunities—not merely for a single innovation, but for all our clients’ future discoveries. In every respect, this is a more streamlined, effective system that reaps far higher rewards than incubators and reactive entrepreneurship.

Deploying Innovation to Capture and Expand Value

In the first two stages, we’ve brought science to innovation and innovation to solution. In Deployment, we bring that solution to the marketplace… the final stage of our clients’ journey from building new mechanisms to focus research to produce innovation feedstock and from mining innovation to proactively build a higher volume of spin-off products and enterprise, now to retaining, expanding and concentrating that growth. This third stage is all too often missed by major sources of innovation as well as those seeking innovation: The heart of Deployment is creating advantages in crucial inputs required by new enterprise to keep them alive and growing, but also to attract and retain other partners in the value chain. This process, often referred to as clustering, enables competitive growth for new enterprise and groups of enterprise—a vital cycle for enterprise and their equity holders, employees and community—rather than a vicious circle.

Our goal is to assure our clients that they can capture the value of their science assets and, most important, create ongoing, enduring financial return for themselves and their economy.

During Deployment, we identify and help redirect our clients’ economic advantages to focus on capturing the value of innovation locally. This way, unlike the common experience where intellectual property, spin-offs and start-ups from innovation sources often migrate away from their point of origin, we help ensure that the full value of science assets is harnessed and grown near-by.

We begin by focusing on strategies to support early stage enterprises, then create “scale” of activities to enable and accelerate clustering… from cluster groups than align resources for related firms and their suppliers to technology parks that serve as microeconomic hubs for new growth by delivering specialized inputs. Clustering aggregates demand, while mediating supply and, we believe, results in world-class leadership… something we hope to instill and encourage in every client.