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A university startup has a number of characteristics, many of which are common to any startup. Central to the startup is the business model, the mechanism by which the company will create, market, and sell products and services in exchange for money from the customer. In addition, university startups involve many discrete operations including technology development, product development, sales and marketing, and manufacturing. The university startup is set in the context of an ecosystem composed of the university, people, and money. The university provides the innovation, usually in the form of intellectual property by way of a license, around which the startup is formed. People provide the expertise, management, judgement, decision-making, advice, and connections essential for launching and growing a startup. Money is the fuel to build the startup. It comes in two basic forms: dilutive and non-dilutive. The former involving a sharing of the company ownership and the latter not.

Many studies have reported astonishing statistics about the rate of introduction of new food products globally, with new products appearing probably at least every hour somewhere around the world, if not more frequently. If you could go into a food store anywhere in the world and somehow take a snapshot of the range of products on the shelf, then revisit it five years later and do a comparison of what you find, there would be a huge surprise in terms of the turnover. Many products will have disappeared, and many new ones will have appeared. For those that remain across this time span, there is a very high likelihood that they have changed in less visible ways, in terms of modifications to their formulation, package, or the process by which they are made. Even fresh foods like fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish are likely to have benefited from scientific advances in their production, quality, or transportation in an optimal state of quality and safety. Why is there such a high rate of change? There are two main drivers, one external to those who produce the food and that relates to the highly fluid and some­times unpredictable expectations and demand of consumers, and one more specific to the food producer that relates to new opportunities in technology, formulation, or scientific understanding. For any new product to be successful on the market requires two successful changes in behavior of consumers. The first is that, instead or as well as what they normally purchase, they need to buy to try a new product, and drop it into their basket or cart as a result of a planned or spontaneous decision to do so. To achieve this is primarily the responsibility of experts in marketing, who can divine what consumers want, develop a strategy accordingly, and then deploy the appropriate tools to bring the product to the attention of those who are most likely to buy the product, such as through promotions, advertisements, and probably, in today’s world, social media campaigns.