Entrepreneurship concepts and applications

Sonicare

The idea behind the Sonicare toothbrush was originally developed by Univeristy of Washington professors David Engel and Roy Martin. They had developed a sonic device that would indeed remove plaque from teeth, but couldn't secure funding or manufacturing/distributing interest from any major companies. David Giuliani stepped in with both entrepreneurial and technical experience. The product, however, could not be developed into a working prototype. While watching waves at the ocean, Giuliani realized that the device might work better if it was designed to create waves in a liquid media -- such as toothpaste and saliva. The three business partners scrapped earlier designs and developed a new prototype that worked on this principle, and soon had a successful prototype -- which was quickly followed by a highly successful business operation.

Research universities are necessarily at the forefront of many fields of knowledge and innovation; with funding sources that do not necessitate continued profitability to the same degree as exists in the private sector, research universities and their researchers have great freedom to experiment and explore. But although these characteristics might make them seem ripe for entrepreneurial ideas, research universities also have many drawbacks. The most glaring is the fact that most (if not all) work produced in the vast majority of research universities, including much that is purely intellectual, automatically becomes the property of the university. Many universities and university systems remain viable entities because of the patents they hold on such technologies and innovations; entrepreneurs will not be receiving a very large piece of the pie using ideas developed in research universities.

Giuliani's sudden oceanic epiphany has less to do with an idea coming out of nowhere than it does with an idea coming suddenly after a great deal of time spent searching for a solution to a highly specific problem. That is, though Giuliani received an insight from a simple and unplanned observation, he would not have had this insight is he had not spent a great deal of his time concerned with precisely the problem that this insight addressed. Giuliani and the two other business partners had been trying fruitlessly to develop a working prototype of their sonic toothbrush, and though this work was all scrapped in favor of the new design, the work was not wasted. Rather, it was necessary in order to provide the context and the circumstances for Giuliani's sudden insight. The idea for what would become the Sonicare toothbrush did not spring fully formed out of the ocean waves like a Minerva/Venus crossbreed, but rather the observation of the ocean waves and their erosion provided Giuliani with the final piece of a puzzle he had been working on for a long time.