Too Good To Fail

Too Good to Fail: Creating Marketplace Value form the World’s Brightest Minds is a guide for senior managers seeking to address their need to rapidly develop globally innovative products with constrained R&D budgets. It creates a practical strategy to address and bring together, for the first time, the emergence of open innovation networks, intellectual property, technology transfer and the ubiquitous compression of technology development time lines in a clear, connected and lucid manner. In the industry today, companies look to remain competitive in the face of the convergence of global innovation networks and sub-optimal equity markets. This book offers a new perspective, turning what was once perceived as a weakness into a strength. Drastic action is required to address the inability of companies to control the development of new technology. It requires relinquishing the illusion of control over new technology development and embracing crowdsourcing discoveries from the world’s leading research institutions to exogenously replace the “R” of corporate “R&D.” The synthesis of the literatures on open innovation and technology transfer should prove useful to the growing number of practitioners in technology transfer. The recent global emergence of Patent Box tax relief has for the first time created the financial incentives for firms to seek to create marketplace value from university intellectual capital, to improve both their competitiveness and after tax income.

Clifford Gross is an executive with leadership experience in academia and commercial enterprises and is passionate about the development, transfer and commercialization of intellectual property to create lasting value. He is an author/co-author of three prior books, The Right Fit, The New Idea Factory and Technology Transfer for Entrepreneurs, and is a named inventor on 19 issued patents from his research.

Clifford founded two public companies where he served as CEO and Chairman. He also served as President and CEO of Innovacorp, an early-stage venture capital fund in Nova Scotia, Canada. Previously, he was director of the graduate program in biomechanics and ergonomics at New York University, Chairman of the Nelson Rockefeller Department of Biomechanics at the New York Institute of Technology and Research Professor at the University of South Florida.

He currently serves as the CEO of Tekcapital Ltd. based in Oxford, U.K. and has completed more than 100 technology transfers from university and federal laboratories to a wide range of companies. He also serves on the board of directors of the Technology Transfer Society and the State University of New York at Empire State College. He received his Ph.D. from New York University and an M.B.A. from the University of Oxford.