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(I) Where's the Beef? Introduction
This series of articles are dedicated to discuss a methodology I call "Where's the Beef". Inventors (professor or otherwise) approach the Technology transfer offices (TOs) of Europe regularly – probably in excess of 100,000 times every year – so we induce from surveys of university tech transfer offices.
For all players the big question is: is it worthwhile time and effort to try to commercialize (of the professor, the TO etc)? Gradually the staff of a TO builds up a portfolio of IPR. A common practice is to file a patent application immediately in order to protect potentially valuable intellectual property. But hereafter – we also know – very few inventions make it to the market place. A lot of effort may have been wasted in IPR management. Pick the winner? If only we had a method to ”pick winners” at an early stage, it would be possible
to weed out those inventions, which will never make it.
Not only the TO staff meet this challenge in their daily practice. Typical seed and venture capital portfolio managers report about how they carry out such a filtering process and find the ”one out of a thousand opportunities”, in some stages based on time consuming ”Technology Valuation".
The poor record (1:1000) is the background for my using the very American expression : Where’s the Beef? Which refers to a famous article in the Journal of The Smithsonian Institute and then a US TV ad for Wendy's burgers about disappointment after our hero having bought a sales message (”buy my burger sandwich!”. After which I open it and see no beef), which turns out to promise more than it holds. Quite often this is the experience for the TO manager or the investor.
The topic, the challenge, therefore, is to look through the invention, understand it and decide whether there will be a business opportunity in it.
Over a period of ten years I have developed a simple, quick-and-dirty methodology in "clinics", workshops, brainstorm sessions etc.
In this series of articles I am going to engage you in discussions about cases, methodology and theoretical backgrounds for the exercises. I am going to take you through some rather simple cases from consumer goods via the automotive sector, health and biotechnology to test the framework I suggest to adopt.
In my “Where’s the Beef” workshops I am going to engage you in how to find the Beef- if any- through discussions about cases, methodology and theoretical backgrounds for the exercises. I am going to take you through some rather simple cases from the consumer goods industry via the automotive sector, health and into biotechnology to present and test the method. I’m not suggesting we can ”pick winners”, but we can make some substantial statements about the potential, if or when our invention hits the market. I claim that we can find the Beef (if there is any) in 1 to 5 working days depending on the nature of the invention and on your level of experience and training.
The most important questions to answer are:
Is the Novel part of the invention good as well? Does it stand out against the ”art”?
Is the Good part, on the other hand, novel?
"Where's the beef?" is a catch phrase, which has, since its first usage, become a somewhat universal, all-purpose phrase questioning the substance of an idea, event or product.It came to public attention in a 1980s television commercial as part of a fast food advertising campaign for the Wendy's chain of hamburger restaurants, featuring the elderly actress Clara Peller (commercials were aired with other people doing
the line, but they were less popular). After receiving a competitor's burger with a massive bun (the competitor's slogan was "Home of the Big Bun"), the small patty prompts the gruff Peller to angrily exclaim "Where's the beef?" The first commercial was aired on January 10, 1984. The humorous ad and Peller's memorable character soon gave the catch-phrase a life of its own, and was repeated in countless
TV shows, films, magazines, and other media outlets.
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