Vida’s President Lisa McElaney and I just returned from the first meeting of this year’s Commercialization Assistance Program (CAP) sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The NIH CAP, now in its sixth year, is designed to assist NIH SBIR Phase II awardees transition their SBIR-developed technologies into the marketplace. Vida is one of about 80 companies selected to participate in the program.

The meeting, hosted by the Larta Institute and held in Los Angeles on November 17^th & 18^th, gave us an opportunity to meet face-to-face with our Program Advisor, Kaare Holm of Emerging Growth Enterprise, and get some critical outside-the-box thinking about our commercialization strategy. A full day of workshops featured exemplary panels of experts and covered a range of topics including partnering, branding, financing and capital, intellectual property management and business plan development.

Healthcare information technology is a relatively new focus for the CAP and it was evident that they are still coming to grips with how to support our industry segment. For example, a breakout panel for healthcare IT was half venture capitalists. I would rather have heard from representatives of the insurance industry, hospitals and health systems that represent the kinds of partners and customers that we are seeking to develop.

Given the diversity of businesses in CAP and their varying stages of development, it would be unreasonable to expect the program to be 100% relevant to our business. But after a 20 year career of building and running multiple businesses, there were times when I felt that I was back in business school 101. Of course, this is only the first step on an 18 month journey so let’s see how things unfold.