Kenneth Morse: “Innovation is invention plus commercialization”
The erstwhile managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center for 13 years asserts that innovative ideas must be well handled from the commercial point of view in order to give rise to successful startups.
In this interview the serial entrepreneur Kenneth Morse, founder of the start-ups3Com Corporation and Aspen Technology, says that the market is the acid test for proving the validity of the technology.
Morse, the founder and managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center for 13 years was one of the speakers at the congress on emerging technologies, EmTech Spain, which was held on 5 and 6 November in Valencia.
“Innovation is invention plus commercialization. It's very important to understand that creating new ideas and new technologies is important, but we also need commercialization”, he says.
He explains that scientists and technology experts usually feel more at home in the laboratory and research centers, so it's very useful to have the help of entrepreneurs to bring them out of their comfort zone and venture onto the market.
“We're at Emtech, and MIT's differential element is the understanding that the work's not finished until the technology has been put into practice, until the concept has been proven, and until innovation has been taken from the laboratory to the market and ultimately achieves total market dominance”, he adds.