Where to Find a Multimillion-Dollar Business Idea

A breakthrough business idea often comes from outside. The successful entrepreneur is one who finds it, refines it, and makes a business plan

By Richard Mammone

I can tell you this with great certainty: You will not stumble upon a multimillion-dollar business idea while brainstorming at your local coffee shop during your lunch break.

At least that's the case if you are like most of today's aspiring entrepreneurs who have been working countless hours for their employers, with little time for lunch, let alone for brainstorming. And even if you do have time on your hands because you've been laid off, you're probably still spinning your wheels. Spending hours concocting ideas doesn't mean they are viable. One cardinal rule of entrepreneurship many newbies fail to grasp is that you don't need to generate the idea yourself.

A successful entrepreneur must be a reductionist. She needs to identify her key talents and outsource everything else whenever possible. She must find a way to use the limited set of resources available to her to find the idea, refine it, and then form a viable business plan. That's what I've done multiple times in starting my own businesses based on technology discovered in academia. Today, I sit in both the Rutgers University Office of Technology Transfer and a new center called the Business, Engineering, Science & Technology Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, which is designed to make the technology transition process easier for fellow entrepreneurs by helping to translate university technologies into real world commercial products.

University Gold Mines

Universities are a rich source of ideas. They spend years improving the principles that underlie many of the products and services currently on the market today. They also come up with new ideas that can create entirely new industries in the future. Universities spend nearly $50 billion every year in federal and state funds, corporate and privately sponsored research contracts, and other financial sources solely on university research projects, according to a 2007 survey by the Association of University Technology Managers. The Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980, encourages universities to patent and license new technologies to generate additional revenues for the university and also for the greater good of society by disseminating new useful products and services. Research powerhouses such as Columbia, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and Rutgers have been able to take the revenue generated from licenses and royalties and plow it back into further research and innovation to create even more ideas for entrepreneurs to capitalize.

When aspiring entrepreneurs come into my office, I always tell them that university faculty turn money into knowledge via their research projects, but more entrepreneurs are needed to turn the knowledge into money by forming startups. Entrepreneurs can find this knowledge at their local university. There are thousands of patents available for businesses to license, ranging from life sciences to energy to software—you just need to know where to find them.

Of course it's not as easy as walking into a professor's office, picking out what you want from the menu, and then launching a market-ready product. Universities have received mixed reviews on assisting entrepreneurs with commercializing innovation since the Bayh-Dole act. Several observers have noted areas that could stand improvement to help universities better support the commercialization process. One common complaint is that the research is usually too early-stage for a commercially viable product or service, and more analysis is needed to start to shape a business plan.

Communication Breakdowns

Back in the day, technology transfer offices, sometimes called offices of technology commercialization (or offices of development or offices of licensing), were set up to assist faculty in getting patents and licensing their intellectual property.

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