Before drafting the Intellectual Property section, follow the same approach as you did with the company section. Jot down information regarding the following items in a Word document

After you have prepared your notes, draft the intellectual property section. A couple of important things to keep in mind (1) Don’t indicate that you have submitted a patent application if you haven’t. There’s a big difference between thinking about applying for a patent and actually doing it; (2) Don’t indicate that you have a patent pending or issued patent unless you can present an associated number; (3) Other forms of IP also have value: trade secrets, registered copyright, and trademarks.

The Market Opportunity section is much more difficult to draft, as it relies on gathering information from other sources. Please keep in mind that at Phase 0 you are asked to take an initial look at market opportunity. At this point you are taking a very quick, somewhat superficial look at the market opportunity. There are various ways that you can approach this challenge. First, the concept of market implies the potential number of entities that have problem X or could benefit from product Y. Market opportunity is expressed in dollars or units. For example, one could say that the market for X product is $500M over the next 10 years or that data available from X source indicates that Y organizations/ individuals have this problem annually. One could also say that industry experts expect a cost savings of $350M a year through the adoption of this new manufacturing method. Any of these are expressions of market opportunity. What is important to keep in mind is that market opportunity is not strictly for your product – but for a class of products and solutions that could be provided by you and all competitors. In other words, a market opportunity is NOT the same thing as your sales projection. If there is a need – then it is one that you and your competitors can all hypothetically fill.

So how do you find this information? Let’s build on the example that DOE provided of “battery separators for lithium ion batteries.” I’m going to go to Google and search in a very simple way using the phrase “market for battery separators”. Please review the accompanying demo to see how I went about finding information that provided the information that I needed.

Once I have found the needed information, I look again at the DOE example of the Commercialization plan and notice that in the first paragraph of the Market Opportunity section that the proposer clarified what their product was and discussed their competitive advantage. In the second paragraph the estimated size of the market opportunity was mentioned as well as those factors that were contributing to market growth. The company identified who their customers would be – i.e who would buy directly from them. Based on the value proposition identified for the targeted customer, an estimate was made of the market penetration that the company could achieve. Market penetration is the same thing as a sales projection, but represented as a % of the entire market. Here you have to use some judgment and perhaps refine your market if it is not reasonable to think that you can penetrate the global market using the strategy that you articulated at the outset.

This part of the planning process is most enjoyable because a quick search opens up a world of possibilities and enables one to quickly find information that can be used to develop one’s commercialization strategy. Now that you have gathered the information, draft the market section. Include three paragraph: (1) In the 1st paragraph, restate what the product is and discuss your competitive advantage. (2) In the second paragraph, name the market that you will be competing in – such as the “battery separator market for lithium ion batteries”, include an estimate of the size of the market opportunity and a brief discussion of those factors that are contributing to market growth. (3) In the third paragraph clarify who your customers will be and where you and they fall in the supply chain. Also include the names of some of the competitors in this market.

The last element of the commercialization plan is a Revenue Statement. This is frequently the hardest part of a Phase I commercialization plan to write – because at this point you may have very little upon which to base your projections. However, the reason this section is essential is that it forces you to think about whether or not there is a need and if, hypothetically you could have an impact on the economy using the strategy you have identified. How should you approach this when you have so little to go on? Let’s take a look at the following statement from DOE’s Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) that must be included in as part of your Phase I commercialization plan. Failure to include this one statement will disqualify your application from further evaluation at DOE.

You MUST contain this statement in the commercialization plan

The question becomes what numbers do you put in the blanks? Do you have to provide a substantiation for the numbers in this commercialization plan? and what if you are not going to use both strategies [direct sales and licensing] – then what do you do? Please see the accompanying demo to see how information can be found, again using Google to complete this section.

Now that you have considered all the information required to draft the commercialization plan and have written sections, please sequence them in the manner that DOE has requested.