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Taking Leaps Of Faith: Evaluation Criteria And Resource Commitments For Early-Stage Inventions, Phillip H. Kim, Reddi Kotha, Sebastian P. L. Fourné, Kristof Coussement

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Successfully developed academic inventions have the potential to spawn new technological domains, form the basis of thriving business ventures, and improve the well-being of society. However, evaluating whether an early-stage scientific invention truly has such potential is extremely difficult, and financially backing such inventions is highly risky. And yet, organizations and their evaluators still back some of these inventions with resources for further development. We investigate this puzzle to pinpoint how and why evaluators decide to offer resource commitments at early stages, despite the red flags raised using standard evaluation criteria. Many academic inventions need these initial resources to dispel …