Most organisations involved in collaborative research understand, in principle, that their work has commercial potential. Fewer have a clear idea of what it actually takes to realise that potential. And almost none are prepared for how long and how complicated the process is.
I have been through it. The Value Australia project produced a commercialisation outcome that a specialist lawyer who had navigated many similar processes described as a remarkable success. It returned millions to the foundation investors - FrontierSI and UNSW over a four-year period. A new company was established, a strategic partner was secured, and the technology went on to find a home inside one of Australia's most significant property transaction platforms.
It was also a process that stumbled near the finish line, involved hundreds of pages of legal agreements, required navigating a major unexpected tax challenge, and consumed more of my time and energy than I had anticipated when we started.
Here is what that process actually looked like, and what I wish I had known going in.
Start Earlier Than You Think You Need To
The first thing to understand about research commercialisation is that the timeline is longer than any research team expects. If you are working on a three or four year project and you want a commercial outcome at the end of it, you need to start the commercialisation work before the halfway point, but ideally from day 1.
This is uncomfortable, because it requires making commercial decisions before the technology is fully developed. But the alternative is worse: arriving at the end of the project with valuable IP and no clear pathway, which means going back to grants, or watching the team disperse before the commercial process is complete.
Document the IP as you go. This sounds obvious, but under the pressure of delivery it is often deprioritised. Every decision, every model iteration, every innovation that could be relevant to a future claim needs to be recorded at the time. You will not be able to reconstruct it later with the clarity and precision that a formal due diligence process will require.
Understand What You Have Before You Try to Sell It
Before approaching the market, you need to be genuinely clear about three things: what the IP actually is, what problem it solves for a specific market, and whether that market is large enough and willing enough to pay.
For Value Australia, we thought through product-market fit and develop a go-to-market strategy. This was more than just a validation exercise - it changed what we built in the final phase of the project, ensuring that the products were structured in a way that matched how the market would actually evaluate and use them, not just what was technically possible.
There is a natural instinct among technically excellent teams to keep optimising the underlying model, to get the accuracy one step closer to perfect. The commercial question is different: is it good enough, and differentiated enough, to win in a competitive market? That is not the same question as whether it is technically optimal.
The output of this phase should be a clear product strategy, an identified set of first customers, a revenue model, and an understanding of how your technology compares to what already exists. Without this, you do not have a basis for a credible pitch.
The Pitch Is a Filtering Tool
We created a pitch deck and took it to the market. Eight to ten slides. A compelling value proposition. Evidence of product-market fit. A clear team story. Early customer traction. Competitive landscape. Revenue projections. An ask.
The pitch is not primarily a persuasion tool. It is a filtering tool. You are not trying to convince everyone. You are trying to find the organisations where there is genuine strategic alignment with what you have built. Those organisations will respond quickly, engage substantively, and show you through their behaviour that they see value in what you are offering.
Strategic alignment matters more than the size of the initial offer. An organisation that deeply understands why your technology is valuable to their business will be a better long-term partner than one that is offering a higher valuation but struggling to articulate the strategic rationale.
That gap tends to become significant during due diligence and negotiation when difficult questions arise. Expect to have five to seven substantive meetings with a potential partner before anything binding is on the table.
Negotiation Is a Process, Not a Conversation
When you get to the stage of negotiating an offer, there are far more variables in play than just the price. Valuation, upfront payment structure, ongoing ownership, dilution provisions, transition of staff, governance of the new entity, the nature of your ongoing relationship with the business, board representation, and earn-out conditions are all elements that can be configured in many different ways.
We engaged a corporate finance adviser who specialised in exactly these kinds of deals. We also engaged an independent valuations expert to produce an external assessment of the IP value. Both were important. The corporate finance adviser had been through the process many times and understood how to navigate it. The independent valuation gave us a defensible anchor for conversations about price.
The advisers will provide advice. They will not solve your problems. I had to work through more unexpected issues than I had anticipated, and the navigation required judgment that only I could exercise because I understood the context and the relationships. Do not assume that engaging good advisers means the hard decisions will be made by someone else.
Due Diligence Is the Real Test
Receiving an agreed offer is roughly halfway through the process. The due diligence phase is where a partner really examines what they are buying.
In our case this involved workshops, detailed written questions, hundreds of supporting documents, and weeks of follow-up. There were around fifteen people on the other side, representing commercial, technical, legal, financial, and tax perspectives. Everything we had said about the technology, the IP, the team, the market, and the financials was examined in detail.
The deal is not done until it is done. This sounds obvious, but it is genuinely difficult to hold onto in practice when you have been working on something for months and the finish line appears to be within reach. Stay alert to the end.
What the Agreements Actually Cover
The final stage involves creating and negotiating the legal agreements. In our case this included the constitution of the new company, an IP assignment deed, a share purchase agreement, a shareholders' deed, an in-kind letter, and a business plan. More than two hundred pages of documents, across four or five rounds of revisions, with legal teams on both sides scrutinising every clause.
Every clause matters. Not because most of them will ever be triggered, but because the ones that are triggered tend to be the ones involving significant money or decisions, and their meaning at that point needs to be unambiguous. Engage a legal team that has done this before, preferably one that has done it in your specific context.
What I Would Tell Anyone Starting This Process
The technical quality of the work matters, but it is not sufficient. A great model that is poorly positioned, inadequately documented, or taken to the wrong partner will not achieve a great outcome.
The process rewards organisations that have thought carefully about commercial value throughout the project, not just at the end. It rewards teams that engage the market genuinely and early. It rewards advisers who are honest rather than reassuring.
And it rewards persistence. Deals of any significance take longer than expected, surface problems you did not anticipate, and require judgment calls that no amount of preparation fully prepares you for.
The outcome, when it works, is worth it. Not just financially, but in terms of what it means for the technology to have a home, a team, and a future that the research program alone could never have provided.