The Collaboration Cycle

The Collaboration Cycle
Originally uploaded by Edward French

Three months into licensing or pursuing a market entry for a new technology everyone involved always feels like they're a few months away from a deal, and no more than a year from revenue. Time and time again we've found it always takes much longer. You can expect to see at least one change in the bigco's team, and if it's an international collaboration each cycle of meetings takes months. This graph tries to compile the wisdom from all our companies licensing and collaboration projects- the conclusion being that, even without any hiccups, it's likely to take around 3 years from first meeting to revenue. This is a real opportunity, in my view, for the largeco's to steal a march on their competitors- getting really quick and sharp about technology acquisition would buy them a great advantage.