Ken Reardon, PhD

“The way we as faculty members at the University think about commercialization is different now compared to when I started. Thirty years ago, it seemed like to commercialize you had to make an actual thing. It seemed like all the commercialization happened in industry. I never thought about anything I did as being patentable or commercializable. Now I know differently, and I think more accurately about what would be patentable or commercializable. It’s not always a device, sometimes it’s a process. We are trying to understand what could be valuable to people.

You have to separate what’s a “cool idea” from what’s a “useful idea” that people will actually purchase. You have to be realistic about how easy it will be to make it and then put it in people’s hands. A lot of the research we do here at the University – we are learning things, uncovering how things work. Often the things we discover come across [to us] as useful. Then I think about how this could be of value to somebody [out in the world], not just fascinating [to me as a researcher]. Participating in the commercialization process has helped me become more aware of a potential end use of my findings, rather than just focusing o the exciting idea I am uncovering in the first place.  Commercialization is the connection between those two things.”