From Lab to Market: Bridging the Deep Tech Commercialization Gap
A conversation about what it really takes to transform cutting-edge research into investable ventures
Having run an IP strategy and patent analytics firm for over two decades—working at the intersection of business, technology, and law—and now leading the UC Berkeley Deep Tech Innovation Lab while investing in startups and building the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator, I’ve witnessed countless brilliant technologies struggle to cross the valley between breakthrough and business. Recently, I received thoughtful questions from a Taiwanese entrepreneur about the realities of deep tech commercialization, IP strategy, and what makes Silicon Valley’s ecosystem so difficult to replicate. Here are my responses.
The Moat Problem: Why Technical Excellence Isn’t Enough
When asked about the biggest capability gap preventing deep-tech projects from becoming investor-ready, my answer is simple: lack of a thoughtful, preconceived moat strategy.
It’s a brutal truth that many technical and academic founders resist. You can have groundbreaking science, elegant engineering, and even early customer interest—but if you haven’t begun building your competitive advantage with strategic intent from day one, you don’t have an investable business.
The issue isn’t just whether a moat exists—it’s whether founders have intentionally designed one. Too many deep tech ventures stumble into defensibility (or fail to achieve it) by accident, treating competitive advantage as an afterthought rather than a foundational design principle. As I’ve written before, deep tech founders face even higher defensibility stakes than software startups—once key technologies are published in patents or academic papers, strategic pivots become nearly impossible. Investors aren’t just betting on your technology; they’re betting on your strategic foresight to build and maintain barriers that keep competitors at bay long enough to capture value.
At the UC Berkeley Deep Tech Innovation Lab, we’ve developed frameworks specifically designed to assess three critical dimensions: technology risk, commercialization risk, and legal/regulatory risk. But frameworks alone aren’t enough. The secret is in the execution—relying on truly interdisciplinary teams to assess opportunities holistically. In traditional settings, engineers talk only to engineers, business developers talk only to customers, and IP strategists work in isolation mapping the competitive landscape. We do things differently—it’s in the collision of these diverse perspectives, simultaneously evaluating technology feasibility, market demand, and competitive defensibility, that real validation emerges.
IP as Strategy, Not Just Protection
After leading hundreds of IP-strategy projects, I’ve come to view intellectual property fundamentally differently than most founders do.
Deep tech ventures need to understand their full IP stack—patents, yes, but also trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, and know-how. The mistake many early-stage companies make is viewing patents purely as legal protection. For emerging deep tech innovations, that’s often the wrong lens.
Instead, we use patents as intelligence—a window into the competitive landscape. What are incumbents protecting? Where are the white spaces? What approaches have been tried and abandoned? Patent analysis becomes market research, revealing strategic opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden.
As for timing, I’m often asked when founders should prioritize “formal” IP strategy relative to product-market fit and funding. The question assumes a false choice. IP considerations should start at the conception of the idea. Not necessarily filing patents immediately, but thinking strategically about what you’re creating, what’s protectable, what’s detectable, and what your competitive moat might be. This costs nothing but changes everything about how you approach development.
The Silicon Valley Question: What Makes It Work?
The hardest question came last: How transferable are Berkeley’s commercialization frameworks to ecosystems like Taiwan or Southeast Asia, where government coordination often substitutes for venture capital?
I’ll be honest—I don’t have a perfect answer on transferability. What I can tell you is why Silicon Valley and Berkeley remain unique, despite decades of attempted replication worldwide:
It’s not just one thing. It’s the density of technical talent concentrated in a small geographic area. It’s access to capital that understands deep tech timelines. It’s a culture that celebrates risk-taking rather than punishing failure. It’s the spontaneous knowledge sharing that happens when competitors grab coffee. It’s infrastructure built specifically to support startups. It’s the gravitational pull of historical success—companies and founders who’ve done it before and are willing to pay it forward.
But perhaps most importantly, it’s the flat organizational culture that allows a 22-year-old PhD student to challenge a tenured professor’s commercial assumptions. It’s the strong links between academia and industry, where professors routinely start companies and executives routinely teach. It’s the diversity of global perspectives colliding in one place. It’s even—I’m only half-joking here—the weather and unique geography. Year-round outdoor meetings foster serendipitous encounters, while the ocean, Napa Valley, Tahoe, and mountains within a few hours’ drive create a quality of life that anchors talent to the region, making it harder for competing ecosystems to lure people away.
A Provocative Suggestion for Asian Ecosystems
That said, there’s one recommendation I’d make to Asian ecosystems trying to strengthen their deep tech capabilities: prioritize art and music education as a way to bridge purely technical gaps.
My own path from music to deep tech ventures has taught me that creativity isn’t confined to canvases and concert halls. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander explores this connection beautifully in The Jazz of Physics, showing how the improvisational thinking required in jazz directly parallels the creative problem-solving needed in theoretical physics. The cognitive flexibility required to improvise jazz or interpret abstract art is the same flexibility that helps engineers imagine novel applications, scientists reframe intractable problems, and business developers see markets that don’t yet exist.
Asian education systems excel at producing technically brilliant graduates with deep expertise. There’s an opportunity to complement this strength by further emphasizing the creative dimension—the ability to make unexpected connections, to see possibility in ambiguity, to take an oblique approach when the direct path is blocked. These aren’t soft skills. They’re essential commercialization capabilities that, combined with technical mastery, create extraordinary founders.
Passion and Necessity: The Real Mothers of Invention
Where government coordination substitutes for venture capital, the dynamics change—but the fundamentals don’t.
Passion and necessity are two of the mothers of invention. The source of funding matters less than the source of motivation. In government-supported ecosystems, you may move more slowly and navigate different approval processes. The path to market may wind through policy rather than pure economics. But there’s a critical distinction: the most transformative innovations emerge when entrepreneurs build technology from the bottom up, driven by opportunity and competition rather than top-down mandates.
Government support can provide crucial resources, but it works best when channeled toward entrepreneurs who’ve identified real market problems—not when it dictates solutions. The underlying question remains the same regardless of funding source: Are you solving a problem that matters enough for someone to pay for it? When founders are pulled forward by market opportunity rather than pushed by policy directives, they move with urgency, adapt with agility, and fight for every customer.
What separates deep tech ventures that scale from those that stall? It’s rarely the technology alone. The winners combine technical excellence with strategic foresight—they’re building their moat while they’re building their prototype. They validate relentlessly, pivot strategically, and think about defensibility from conception.
But here’s what can’t be replicated through frameworks alone: they’re hunting opportunity, not executing mandates. Competition energizes them. Market feedback shapes them. Geography matters—tremendously. But even in ecosystems without Silicon Valley’s unique advantages, the ventures that break through share this entrepreneurial DNA: they treat commercialization not as a phase that comes after innovation, but as a discipline that runs parallel to it from day one.
This was written with help from Claude. Images sourced from MidJourney.