An Innovation Capitalist is a type of innovation intermediary

Intermediary

An intermediary is a third party that offers intermediation services between two trading parties. The intermediary acts as a conduit for goods or services offered by a supplier to a consumer...

.

Innovation capitalists are firms, often with a particular industry expertise, that seek out and evaluate ideas and technologies from the inventor community and other external sources. One type develops and refines those ideas to the point where their market potential is validated, and they then sell the rights to the innovation to large client firms. Another form of innovation capitalist seeks out ideas and technologies under contract from large client firms; develops and refines those ideas to the point where their market potential is validated, then sells the rights to the innovation to their client. Both types of innovation capitalist invest in the technology in order to reduce the client company’s acquisition costs and early-stage risks. In return, they share in the proceeds from the innovation.

The term Innovation Capitalist was coined by Prof. Satish Nambisan of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Stephen Van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer School on November 5, 1824 with a letter to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Blatchford, in which van Rensselaer asked Blatchford to serve as the first president. Within the letter he set down several orders of business. He appointed Amos Eaton as the school's...

 and Prof.Mohanbir Sawhney

Mohanbir Sawhney

Prof. Mohanbir Sawhney is a management consultant, author and a McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology at the Kellogg School of Management. He advises on 25 companies about their e-commerce strategies.-Personal life and education:...

 of Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

 in their article in the Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review is a general management magazine published since 1922 by Harvard Business School Publishing, owned by the Harvard Business School. A monthly research-based magazine written for business practitioners, it claims a high ranking business readership among academics, executives,...

in March 2007.

External links

• http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0703/article/F0703D.jhtml?type=F
• http://endlessinnovation.typepad.com/endless_innovation/2007/03/innovation_word.html
• http://shoptalkmarketing.blogspot.com/2007/02/proposing-value-adding-middleman-for.html
• Evergreen Innovation Partners - a Product Capitalist(R) firm that focuses on consumer products. Two of EIP's partners maintain active blogs on the innovation capital model: Dispatches From the Frontier and View From the Bridge.
• IGNITE IP, LLC - an Innovation Capitalist (IC) venture fund that invests in and manages all aspects of the commercialization process for disruptive and valuable technology.
• IP2Biz LLC - An Innovation Capitalist (IC) that unearths technologies primarily at major research universities.
• MindForce Consulting (MFC) -- An Innovation Capital firm that assembles Commercialization Teams from MFCs core consultants and MFC's professional talent network of 150,000 MBA's around the world, to commercialize clients' technology, usually by building new ventures or finding licensees.