Unraveling the Translational Exchange between Academic Research and product Scale-up for disruptive technologies: Critical Comments on Devices and path forward.

Academic translational research efforts to industry are often an underlying sought-after goal among the researchers. Through the interchanges of research endeavors between academia-industry, great innovations can/has been achieved that cater to the real-world application by bridging “industrially relevant” problem solving with pursuing fundamental concepts. It is pertinent that most of the studies from university level research works may not translate into demonstrable products in the market as many factors are at play here which are beyond the scope or reach of academic researchers. Funding support, individual goals of researchers, socio-economic factors and most importantly the technical know-how of generating revenue strategies to make it a profitable startup are few of the factors that have slowed the pace of collaborative efforts. However, we believe that the most critical factor is identification of the critical parameters that solves long standing problems that hinder the scale-up of the lab scale research into marketable products. To illustrate this, we take three most relevant examples, devices for fuel generation, devices to utilize solar radiation and devices for sensing and other related applications. In this perspective article, we provide an in-depth case study of each of these critical parameters to comment on the direction of research avenues that can serve as step-stones for the commercialization of university-level lab research studies.