Entrepreneurship for Physicists

Book excerpt: Physicists are very smart people. Still, when it comes to moving their ideas from university to market, they often lack the basic set of know-hows that could help them succeed in the technology transfer process. To fill this gap, Entrepreneurship for Physicists: A Practical Guide to Move Ideas from University to Market offers a concise analysis of the key ingredients that enable entrepreneurs to bring added value to their customers. After a short discussion on why university physicists should pay more attention to this aspect of their professional life, the book dives into a set of theories, models, and tools that could help an academic scientist transform an idea into customer added value. The reader will be introduced to effectuation theory, internal resource analysis, external landscape analysis, value capture, lean startup method, business canvases, financial projections, and to a series of topics that, albeit often neglected, do play a fundamental role in technology transfer, such as trust, communication, and persuasion. In the last chapter, the book explains howmost of the concepts discussed actually find application in the career of scientists in a much broader sense.