Entrepreneurs must be ready to chase new opportunities

Sunday Business Post - New to the Market supplement - Feb 10 2008

Entrepreneurs on the hunt for a viable market must be prepared to knock on a lot of doors, according to Dr. Steven Collins, recent co-winner of the Trinity College Dublin Innovation Award for 2007.

Collins and Hugh Reynolds were recognised in December for their work establishing Havok, a games industry software company that was sold last September to Intel for €76m.

Havok is a world leader in the development and sale of real-time physics and animation software to the games industry, but in 1999, when Collins and Reynolds traveled to the US with just a laptop showcasing their technology, nobody in the global industry knew who they were or what the company, then called Telekinesys Research, could offer.

“In my opinion, there is no point hiring marketing consultants who will compile reports or whatever, you have to get out there,” said Collins. “You, the people who have the passion for the idea, need to communicate that passion to the market. Identify the customers who are most likely to take the product on and just beat their doors down."

"Myself and Hugh spent quite a bit of time on planes, going to visit people, in the US particularly, and in Europe as well. The biggest first event for us was attending the Game Developer Conference in San Jose in 1999. We had a laptop with the technology on display, and we just talked to any developer who would listen to us."

Collins said some entrepreneurs shy away from this hard leg and brass-neck work.

“It is easier to create a business plan, and do up an Excel spreadsheet with an interesting hockey stick sales curve, but fundamentally you have to get out and talk to people and find out if they will buy it, and if not, why not."

The award is part of a growing awareness of the importance of commercialisation to academic research in Ireland, Collins said.

"Commercialisation is something that Trinity has always been interested in,” he said. “In general, in Ireland now, there is a lot more focus on commercial output, and not just academic output. I think that is great, you need a bit of both."

Enterprise Ireland provided support for Collins and Reynolds from day one, Collins said.

"In 1996, Hugh and myself made an application to Enterprise Ireland and that eventually grew into Havok in 1998 and 1999,” he said. “At the time we were very naive academics. It was as much about blind optimism, as it was about being in the right place at the right time."

At that time the revolutionary Sony PlayStation 2 was about to be released, and games developers needed new technologies to take advantage of its huge processing power.

“The whole Havok story was premised on getting our new technology into the hands of the game developers in time for the launch of Playstation 2, which represented a big watershed moment in gaming history,” Collins said.

Trinity Venture Capital (TVC Holdings), helped fund Havok’s development, along with ICC Venture Capital, now part of Bank of Scotland (Ireland). Its technology has been used in more than 160 computer games for PlayStation, Xbox and other games consoles, including Tomb Raider and Halo. It has also been used to create special effects for films, such as Troy and The Matrix.

Collins left the company in 2005 and returned to Trinity to pursue new research.

"It gets to the point where there is a stable company, and the original founders, who are perhaps a bit more fanciful, want to do new things,” he said. “The games industry is growing rapidly, and the technology is changing day by day. I find that very exciting."

Collins is currently heavily involved in the TCD Research and Innovation Entrepreneurship Programme.

"Right now, I am focusing on a number of projects that have secured funding from Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland,” he said. “For example we are working on a version of a virtual Dublin, looking at technologies like Second Life and trying to anticipate what might be required by corporations in the future, when technologies like Second Life become part of everyday life, just like email and text messages are now.”