Commercialisation Readiness Check

---
name: commercialisation-readiness-check
description: "Help a researcher or team assess whether the idea and team are ready to begin commercialising — from a learning-speed, not perfection, perspective."
---

# Commercialisation Readiness Check

## Purpose

Help a researcher or team assess whether the idea and team are ready to begin
commercialising — from a learning-speed, not perfection, perspective.

## Based on

the owner's published commercialisation guide (owner, 2025). Chapter "Are You
Ready to Begin?" (pp. 63-67).

- Eesley & Roberts (2012) — mission-driven founders are more resilient, build
  stronger partnerships
- Christensen (1997) — disruptive innovations rarely look world-changing at
  the start; they develop through feedback and iteration

## Method

1. Mission test: what change do you want this innovation to create in the
   world? Mission-driven founders are more resilient and build stronger
   partnerships under uncertainty.
2. "Is the idea good enough" test: no idea starts in its final form. Focus on
   learning velocity, not perfection. Test: does the solution save/reduce/
   remove time, cost, or friction, even at a small scale?
3. Understand the moving target: is your innovation disruptive (creates a new
   market), sustaining (improves the current one), or incremental (refines a
   mature system)? Each requires a different pace and funding logic.
4. Map readiness across four dimensions: technical (prototype scale-up,
   manufacturability), commercial (customer interaction, value proposition),
   financial (funding, cash flow), and managerial (roles, governance). These
   are not prerequisites — they build up along the way.
5. Identify the balance between over-analysing and moving forward without
   thought: start with structured investigation, use existing tools (see
   `founder-competence-self-assessment`) to test assumptions.
6. Make the decision: if the idea connects to a genuine problem, the team is
   ready to learn, and the mission feels real — you're already ready enough
   to begin. You don't need complete certainty, you need momentum.

## Gotchas

- The "is the idea good enough" test (step 2) is explicitly NOT a proxy for
  "will the idea succeed" — it only tests learning velocity and small-scale
  friction reduction. Treating a pass on this test as validation of idea
  quality contradicts the skill's own point that idea quality is "revealed
  only by the market test."
- The four readiness dimensions (technical, commercial, financial,
  managerial) are stated to NOT be prerequisites — waiting until all four
  are strong before starting inverts the Method, which says they "build up
  along the way."
- Misclassifying the innovation's type in step 3 (disruptive vs. sustaining
  vs. incremental) sets the wrong funding pace and expectations downstream
  — e.g. treating an incremental refinement as disruptive invites
  premature large-scale funding pursuit (see `funding-pathway-design`).
- This skill deliberately withholds a go/no-go verdict (see "What this
  skill does NOT do"). Reading its output as a stop/go decision rather
  than a structured self-assessment misuses it — the actual criterion
  ("genuine problem + team ready to learn + mission feels real") is a
  judgment call the skill only helps structure, not make.

## What this skill does NOT do

- Does not give a final go/no-go recommendation for you — it structures the
  self-assessment.
- Does not objectively measure "idea quality" — that's revealed only by the
  market test.

## Continue from here

- Next in this pack: `../founder-competence-self-assessment/SKILL.md` — Work
  through a structured 10-area / 76-item self-assessment (AFCA) of a
  founder's or team's readiness for an academic spin-out or research-based
  startup.
- Pack's shared guardrails: `../../CLAUDE.md`
- Overview of the full journey: `../commercialisation-journey-roadmap/SKILL.md`

## References

- `../../references/case-studies.md` — 7 spin-out examples from different
  industries and regions
- `../../references/terminology.md` — the handbook's glossary
- `../../references/sources.md` — the handbook's own source references
- `../../CLAUDE.md` — the pack's shared guardrails