While many universities around the U.S. offer entrepreneurship and new venture formation courses to scientists and engineers, the gap between rhetoric and practice is still present. The practical knowledge needed to define a commercial use-case of a technology relies heavily on human-centered factors, motivations, and socio-economic norms, all of which are not typically part of a scientist’s training (they are exposed to society as observers and consumers, but not as product inventors).
Creative scientists often need support in the process of conceptualizing products and services - based on technology they developed during their careers - that solve problems of recognized relevance and importance in society. This process effectively translates scientific knowledge into new products and services.
However, data from NSF I-Corps clearly show that most startups fail because of a lack of users or customers. Digging deeper, one finds this is caused by lack of rigor in framing the understanding of the problem and/or need. Most scientist founders rely on their intuition and networks to “test” whether they have identified a valid need. They often fail to structure the effort on a purely socio-economic basis, as they bring their technological perspective to every possibility they encounter. This leads them to include false-positive signals of market demand or false-negatives signals of opportunities.
Not being equipped to fight this bias, scientist founders embark on long journeys to develop products and services that satisfy needs defined through warped lenses, wasting time and resources in building something that has no meaningful demand. How can scientist-founders avoid this fate? By developing theses about the key demand drivers and testing them through real-world experiments, gathering evidence about the problems and key measures that matter to the user or customer.
These drivers of demand are specific measures and metrics that a given customer group cares about, for which they either craft a solution or acquire some kind of product and service to address the deficit or enhancement they seek on such metrics. For example, a commuter is searching for a more comfortable bicycle to ride to work. “More comfortable” might mean their hands don’t get numb after 30 minutes of riding. Another example is the person who wants to save on restaurants by cooking at home without the necessary prep. The metric here is time to prep and cost per meal. And so on.
To discover what metrics matter and to whom, scientist founders must embark on a research journey to meet people who may have the issues he or she wants to solve and may be willing to talk about these in short interviews. Scientist founders may also consider other data about pain points or needs, as evidence needed to test their hypotheses.
The goal of primary market research is to assess the level of demand. In a market system, demand is measured by the number of people who want to acquire and use a given product or service, for whatever the reason. In other words, the number of people willing to use something new and replace whatever option they have available today.
How does the scientist founder know when they have captured or gained a solid understanding of demand? There are many ways to characterize demand, from the simple description of “people will buy 10 widgets at price X, 15 and price Y” to a more complex definition including recurrence, alternatives, and product mixes.
Thinking about what demand might look like based on solid understanding of the target user or customer helps the scientist founder make better choices, avoiding unnecessary pain and saving some serious money.