Industrial Technology and Venture Services
Building Human Bridges of Cooperation
Together Everybody Achieves More
- Overview
Invention, innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship are all related to the process of creating something new, and successful entrepreneurship often involves a combination of invention and innovation:
- Invention: The discovery of something new, often the result of unique intuition or genius. Inventors are usually creative people who are looking to create something new, but they often don't try to sell their invention on the market.
- Innovation: The successful implementation and adoption of something new, such as a new idea, process, or product. Innovation is the application of creativity to transform existing inventions into practical products or processes that have real-world utility.
- Entrepreneurship: The process of designing a new business, where the entrepreneur perceives a new business opportunity and gathers the resources to implement it. Entrepreneurs focus on taking a product to market where it can sell to customers or clients.
Invention is often the foundation for entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurs often start with an innovative idea or technological breakthrough that forms the basis of their venture. Once an invention exists, entrepreneurs need to innovate to create value and bring their ideas to life.
- Basic vs. Applied Research
Basic research is curiosity driven. It is motivated by a desire to expand knowledge and involves the acquisition of knowledge for knowledge's sake. It is intended to answer why, what or how questions and increase understanding of fundamental principles. Basic research does not have immediate commercial objectives and although it certainly could, it may not necessarily result in an invention or a solution to a practical problem.
Applied research is a methodology used to solve a specific, practical issue affecting an individual or group. New knowledge acquired from applied research has specific commercial objectives in the form of products, procedures or services. This scientific method of study and research is used in business, medicine, computing and communications, sciences, and engineering in order to find solutions that may improve health, solve scientific problems or develop new technology.
Fundamental research answers the initial question of how things work. This fundamental knowledge is then used by applied scientists and engineers, for example, to make improvements on existing products, technologies and processes. Likewise, basic researchers take advantage of improved technologies to answer new fundamental questions. It is an important cycle for advancement.
- Bridging and Networking
The “valley of death” is a common term in the start-up world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a start-up, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers.
"Many breakthrough technologies originate in R&D and academic laboratories, but many perish there as well. As scientists and entrepreneurs try to move nascent technologies from the research phase to large scale commercialization, they face high capital costs, intense competition from deeply entrenched incumbents, and a dizzying array of contractual and financing hurdles." -- [MIT]
The EITA Venture Teams explore key scale-up challenges and provide possible solutions and resources. In addition, the EITA organizes a variety of conferences, workshops, events, and coffee meetings suited to networking with scientists, start-up founders, angel investors, corporate venture leaders and emerging global leaders in venture capital. This fast-paced knowledge sharing is a key part of what makes the EITA a world leading hotbed of innovation in the 21st century.
A true venture partner provides more than money, but mentorship,
counseling and strategic advice that can elevate start-up firms and small businesses to
new heights.
- Creativity, Innovation, and Invention
One of the key requirements for entrepreneurial success is your ability to develop and deliver something unique to the market. Entrepreneurship is associated with creativity over time, the ability to develop something original, especially an idea or a representation of an idea. Innovation requires creativity, but innovation is more specifically the application of creativity.
Innovation is the expression of creativity into usable products or services. In an entrepreneurial context, innovation is any new idea, process, or product, or change to an existing product or process, to add value to an existing product or service.
All inventions contain innovations, but not every innovation rises to the level of unique inventions. For us, an invention is a truly novel product, service or process. It will be based on previous ideas and products, but it's a leap forward, it's not seen as a complement or variation on an existing product, but something unique.
- Trends Reshaping the Future of IT and Business
It's easy to become desensitized to the new technologies hitting the market, each with its own promise of changing (more often, "revolutionizing") the business world. Collectively, these technology trends are accelerating the key features that define the digital age: granularity, speed, and scale. But it is the magnitude of these changes (computing power, bandwidth, and analytical complexity) that opens the door to new innovations, businesses, and business models.
For example, the advent of the cloud and 5G has exponentially increased computing power and network speeds, enabling greater innovation. The development of augmented and virtual reality metaverses opens the door to virtual R&D through means such as digital twins and immersive learning.
Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Software 2.0 (machines writing code) are bringing a host of new services and products within reach, from self-driving cars to connected homes.
As government intervention in the economy becomes more prevalent, the struggle for dominance in industrial technology is intensifying. Investors once enamored of asset-light companies and high returns had better be prepared to spend billions on them or risk being squeezed out.
This is not just a reaction to the Russia-Ukraine war and geopolitical tensions between the US and China. Commodity shortages and labor shocks over the past two years have exposed the fragility and unwieldyness of global supply chains.
To ensure we don't find ourselves in this situation again, governments in the West and elsewhere are stepping up their multibillion-dollar industrial policies to incubate the next generation of hardware, including chips, 5G base stations, electric vehicles, batteries, and high-tech machinery and systems.
[More to come ...]