Non-dilutive and strategic partnership approaches to commercializing microbial technologies

Microbial technologies for commodity chemical and fuel production have numerous technical challenges to overcome in route to commercial success. Accordingly, much of this meeting discusses innovations in technology, development and scale-up. Meantime, technologies rarely if ever sell themselves based solely upon their own merit. Accordingly, I would suggest that commercialization strategy requires an equal degree of innovation, and should become a heightened focus of discussion for the success of this industry.

In this presentation, I will share some of my own personal experience in innovating commercial strategy. Specifically, I will discuss an approach of using non-dilutive capital (e.g., grants, licensing revenue, and profit from other business) in consortium with strategic relationships to advance our small business’s commercial interests in large capital markets. The approach is a modified version of bootstrapping that uniquely works for strategic stakeholders in route to building partnerships. The purpose of first working for strategics is to demonstrate value and build trust, which lays a foundation to build a partnership that utilizes the collective wisdom as opposed to unidirectional information flow. Lastly, as a small business we employ our access to non-dilutive grant capital to reduce early stage technology development risk.