What Scentczar Can Do For You

• Market research
• Independent outside evaluation of your new product idea
• Help you prepare marketing literature and develop a marketing plan including budget and tasks
• Serve a part of your new marketing team evaluating manufacturers representatives, etc.

Contact Joe Roehl at jroehl@scentczar.com for more details.

Swords into Plowshares

There is life after DOD funding and you can get there if you understand the path and the pitfalls.  Given the uncertainty in the US defense budget, the need for defense contractors to develop commercial products based on their expertise gained in military IR&D programs has not been this great since WW II.  There are many stories of this process coming to failure but there are many success stories that few people remember or talk about ranging from the Douglas DC3 to the Internet.  Here are some of the potential advantages of developing a commercial product based on your military IR&D expertise:

• You set your own price in the marketplace without any need for justification
• No limit on your unit profit.  Profit margins of 25% to 50% are normal in high-end industrial products
• You don't need a big staff to manage a commercial product.  You can build a network of representatives and distributors to sell your product without a major investment.
• You can easily upgrade your product, adding improvements and obsolescing the older versions,  without anyone's permission.  You are totally in control of configuration control.
• Bye bye paperwork.

Commercial Market versus Consumer Market

Developing a consumer product based on military IR&D would seem to be the most difficult challenge, unless you are in a very specialized industry such as developing food items, but there are markets that have important similarities to the military market.  For example:

• Products designed for utilities, manufacturing plants, or chemical process plants require robust outdoor operation and extreme reliability,
• Products designed for non-DOD federal, state and local governments including National Labs, state transportation agencies, police departments, etc. are operated and maintained by staff with quite similar training to military personnel.

Products for industrial firms tend to be an easy transition for military products:

• The customer usually has a technically competent staff that can honestly evaluate a new idea and give valuable feedback,
• Customers usually are open to new and better ways of solving problems.

Why does the process of introducing a commercial product based on military IR&D so often fail?

• Military products are usually designed to operate in extreme environments with little control over their operating environment.  Commercial products may be required to be rugged or withstand some unusual condition but, in general, the environment is well controlled and well understood.  Military designers often don't have the proper mindset and tend to overdesign the product greatly increasing its cost.
• Military products assume a particular model for repair and maintenance of the product that does not exist in the commercial world.  Finding a way to service your product in the field may be almost as important as the original innovation.
• Selling commercial products requires a great deal of sales literature, web design, and image building not required in a military environment.  There tend to be many customers instead of a few customers who conveniently appear at the same briefing.  It is easy to waste a great deal of money trying to cover your bases.  Market research is very important is targeting your limited resources.
• People don’t read resumes.  Customers tend to be much more interested in the actual product and how it will make their life more profitable or easier rather than who is on the development staff.

A Success Story - Commercial Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS)

IMS came about in the early 20th century as a technique for studying fundamental constants and mechanisms in physics.  No one could have imagined that it would be useful as a chemical instrument as, for example, gas chromatography or mass spectrometry.  It took government funding to adapt IMS to real-world detection applications.  IMS was moved from a laboratory curiosity to a practical instrument using NASA funding.  IMS was initially used to study the plasma surrounding returning space capsules that caused blackouts in radio communications.  The developer of this early IMS technology found some high end commercial applications but IMS was not yet ready to be a rugged field instrument. IMS remained an obscure instrument used by certain scientists in specialized materials testing applications until it was picked up by the military as a chemical warfare detector.  Military funding changed everything.  Military detection programs demonstrated IMS as a practical, useful, product with definite advantages over competitive technologies.  The Bendix Corporation decided to develop a commercial product based on its military IMS expertise.  Bendix dedicated a small team to commercialize the product with a dedicated marketing person (that’s me), an applications engineer, and a hardware designer who could draw on other company staff for hardware and software design only as required.  Accounting set up a separate profit and loss center for us and away we went.  The product turned out to be a great success in specific applications in the petrochemical and semiconductor industries and resulted in a new company spun off specifically to exploit the commercial market.

Summary

Potential commercialization of military IR&D offers a bright silver lining to an otherwise very dark cloud.  It is practical, it has been done, and you can do it too.  At least according to the traditional story, it was a catastrophic event, the impact of a giant meteorite that resulted in the extinction of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals leading to the rise of man. Get out from under that rock, dust yourself off, and get on with it. Scentczar is here to help.