Academic Entrepreneurship: How to Bring Your Scientific Discovery to a Successful Commercial Product 1st Edition

A really good resource for making ideas into a business. Highly recommend.

Not quite applicable

This small but mighty book is jam-packed with expert information aimed at anyone from the academic scientific community who has a good idea they want to develop and get out into the market. It is clear, very detailed and comprehensive and walks you through the entire process step by step. The author understands the landscape and all the pitfalls and does a superb job of guiding you through it all and providing an excellent list of references for each chapter as well, so that you can read more, before and during your entrepreneurial adventure.

This is a technical guide to entrepreneurship within an academic environment. This is quite an academic text and that is why it is priced the way that it is. Not all academic entrepreneurs are going to follow the paths described here which is the patent and development route. Personally from my view as an intellectual property law student Patents are not worth the paper they are written on. They are expensive and hard to defend and more likely to end up being commercialised in partnership with an existing company. The big players can always bleed a university dry before you can protect a patent effectively. Some universities are well known for their spin-off companies but they often do best with their use of know-how or copyright (software inventions) and not through Patents.

Although this a sensible book to read if you are a US academic, there are too many divergence points for it to prove useful for the UK market. Patents are fraught....do you choose a UK, European or international patent and trademark? A slip up could lead to your idea being copied and exploited. Your wonderfullly selected name might be in use in your sector or owned by a global corporate (Seen that one often enough).Your University will very probably assert its rights to a slice of the pie. You probably got ‘EU’ funding to start with and coukd be tied with other interests. If you are developing a medical device that could affect health, that’s a whole new set of UK hoops to jump through. It just doesn’t seem worth assuming the applicability to this side of the Atlantic.

A good book if you have a particular business idea that you want to develop and sell. It's focused on the scientific/technological sector of the market and ideal for graduates and college/university academics either coaching students in this field, or indeed developing concept and actual products themselves. It's a well organised, accessible handbook that covers a lot of ground without any waffle. Focused and very useful.

Really well written and researched. A really interesting and informative read.