Page 7 - So-What-Who-Cares-Why-You

Foreword

As I write this, the Purdue Foundry is celebrating the close of its second
fiscal year. That makes the release of this new edition of So what? who
cares? why you?® very timely as we look back on two years of intense
pre-incubation and almost twenty years of overall incubation experience
with an eye to critique and improve our own programs. It is also timely
because the So what? who cares? why you? methodology is a cornerstone
of what we’ve accomplished so far at the Foundry.

Charged with being the “Easy Button” for researchers who are driven
to commercialize their innovations through a start-up, we are equal
parts incubator, accelerator, entrepreneurial hub, and co-working space.
Everything we do is focused on servicing the innovative and entrepreneurial
members of our community, be they faculty, graduate students,
undergraduate students, or friends of the university.

When we first conceptualized the Foundry, a small group of us drew from
our combined decades’ worth of incubation and startup experience and
began to assemble the pieces of programming that we felt were essential
to the mission of launching start-up companies as an adjunct to Purdue
University’s highly accomplished technology licensing efforts. It was
abundantly clear to us that, in the earliest stages of innovation – as early
as the pre-disclosure, “I have an idea” stage – we needed to be able to
guide researchers and innovators to clearly articulate the value of their
ideas. We knew that getting them to explain the technical and innovative
aspects of their ideas would not be a problem. But having them put that
into clear and succinct business language would be an essential necessity
and, perhaps, a significant challenge.

We were correct in our assumption. Every day here, we work with brilliant
innovators and researchers who have ideas to change the world and the
passion to match. They are pushing the boundaries of what is possible and
what will become possible in the future. But many brilliant ideas stumble
before they can fly simply because they are not articulated in the language
of a business proposition.

Foreword V