A Toolkit for Innovators
Activate helps scientists develop as leaders, mature their ideas, and learn what it takes to build a viable, scalable business. We’ve learned a lot from helping dozens of scientists become entrepreneurs. And we want to share it with any scientist who dreams of bigger things.
The Activate Science Innovator’s Handbook
Activate wrote the Science Innovator’s Handbook in partnership with the The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to help any and all scientists who are becoming entrepreneurs to understand the unique challenges they face. Download it to get the years of collective insight we’ve had in running the Activate Fellowship.
Chapter 1: Choosing Your Path
Chapter 2: Elements of Risk
Chapter 3: Customer Discovery and Techonomics
Chapter 4: Fundraising Basics
Simple Partnership Agreement (SiPA)
The project contract is one of the most complex, most fragile elements of corporate-startup partnerships. SiPA can help!
Techonomics
Activate has created a series of instructional videos on how to think about, plan, and model your product's value and cost in the market.
We also provide a set of downloadable models to learn from and hack.
Activate’s Techonomics series is rooted in techno-economic analysis (TEA) and models that have been used for decades to support technology development in private and public sectors.
We encourage science entrepreneurs, program developers, investors, and other stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem to download Techno-Economic Analysis for Hard-Tech Innovation by Chris Burk. A leading TEA practitioner, Burk wrote this white paper based on his work with more than 20 Activate Fellows as well as many other science entrepreneurs.
The paper outlines a roadmap for making TEA accessible for any early-stage hard tech company. He provides use cases for successfully using TEA to assess economic benefits, R&D opportunities, risks, and areas of uncertainty. Finally, Burk shows how and why policymakers should use TEA to inform their decisions and strategies for supporting technology development. Activate partner Schmidt Futures funded the white paper.
