Stoney's British Pub
3007 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE
7:30pm
Vanessa ChanUniversity of Pennsylvania
“What is Preventing Technologies from Making it to the Market Place?”
97% of patents never make it to the market place because we do not teach scientists and engineers the non-technology barriers that a technology solution must overcome for it to be deployed in the real world. Today we use an antiquated approach to steward technologies along the commercialization path – TRLs (Technology Readiness Levels) – developed by NASA in the 1970s to launch rockets to the moon. The problem is that TRLs do not consider non-technology barriers that must be overcome (e.g., unit economics, supply chain) for a technology to be used in the real world. As Chief Commercialization Officer at the US Department of Energy, I spearheaded a new approach to technology commercialization, ARLs (Adoption Readiness Levels). This talk will present these approaches which an aspiring entrepreneur, scientist or engineer who has a technology that they want to deploy into the real world, can use so their patent doesn’t languish on paper.