Creating and Developing a Tech Startup

Before any technical or financial consideration, the creation of a technology company is above all a human adventure that requires each associate to make personal choices. Besides your initial intuition that a new cutting-edge technology offer is marketable, we want to familiarize you with several development methods and practices. Mostly you will be asked to explore what the potential applications of your offer will be and the different ways to make it stand out from the existing offers.

This session will familiarize you with the principal steps for bringing an innovative project to fruition. Among other things, we will evoke the fundamentals of managing a project and the knowledge acquisition process that enables you to make crucial decisions for the company over time.

We will also investigate the principal pillars of your strategic project and suggest some guidelines for the company strategy. You will be asked to understand the dynamics of the market that you are targeting and to identify what it takes to be leader in your segment. Your margin for maneuver will not be the same if your innovation creates a new market versus if it substitutes an existing offer. We will also invite you to analyze the customer-perceived utility value, in terms of benefits as well as sacrifices. Finally, we will tackle an essential aspect concerning the valorization of a technology and the development of a company – intellectual property – and give you several solutions in order to use it wisely.

Young technology companies often spring out of research work conducted in public or private laboratories. The technology transfer of this work can take place directly by license agreements. But in certain cases, the creation ex-nihilo of a company is the option used to transform academic learning and outcomes into an innovative product or service. This session will familiarize you with the purpose of a technology transfer service at a top-tier university with respect to scientific production.

You will learn about how a young researcher decided to create his own company to exploit his research work immediately after completing his thesis. We will return once again to the importance of the team and the manner in which tech startups are structured. We will notably examine the role of the leader and conflict management, commonplace in startups. Finally, you will hear about the experiences of two management sciences researchers who studied the emergence of several dozen cooperative scientific projects at the Ecole Polytechnique.

The development of an innovative technology is an exciting adventure that is often like an obstacle course when it comes to finding the first sources of financing. Though new technologies are fascinating, many investors are reluctant to finance them because there are real technical, sales and human risks at stake.

Even so, many sources of financing exist and tech entrepreneurs demonstrate tremendous creativity to successfully move forward from the development stage of a breakthrough technology to the commercialization of an innovative and profitable offer. This session deals with the financing of the innovation and will show you how to assess your financing needs and how to find the corresponding resources. You will also gain insight into the reasoning of venture capitalists, who sometimes finance companies at a very early stage.