# What Do We Learn from Good Practices of Biologically Inspired Design in Innovation?
## 3 Results and Discussion
### Innovation and Commercialization Process / Steps Toward Commercialization
The overall commercialization process lasted 1-23 years in total, with an average duration of approximately 6 years. Phase 1 (concept to prototype) had an average duration of approximately 1.9 years and phase 2 (prototype to market), of approximately 3.7 years. The analysis of the 14 business case studies showed an average time-to-market of approximately 9 years. Figure 4: Number of patents per BID concept based on the BioM Innovation database [22]. As shown, 70 BID concepts led to a single patent (74%), 14 to two patents (15%), 3 to three patents (3%), and 8 to five or more patents (8%). The time for developments in BID varies with regard to the intensity of research that is necessary to understand the biology in detail, to abstract the underlying principle of a biological phenomenon, and to transfer it successfully to technology (phase 1). Furthermore, the development from a prototype to a viable product (phase 2) is likely more time-consuming. The common problem of up-scaling may be specifically demanding in BID, as seen for instance with the development of biologically inspired hierarchical structures in material sciences [58]. In such cases, the development process may require phases of reverse engineering and iterative loops. As each project in BID is unique, a deeper analysis of more cases will be needed in the future to make more precise differentiations and comparisons. However, the development times reflect certain barriers that are often raised by industry regarding why BID may not be of interest to them. The time needed to develop a viable prototype or a final product seems to be too long for projects in industry that need a solution to an existing problem. This holds true especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) which often do not have a specific innovation subunit with the budget and time for future developments. Of course, every development takes time and needs money, and if solution-finding were easy, no creativity technique or innovation management would be necessary. However, BID has specific challenges regarding its process, as mentioned before, and the challenge \"to use the paradigm to address increasing numbers of real problems that translate into real products in the market\" [6] requires much more work. Therefore, BID could be used in various ways, for instance to generate new ideas, coming from a solution space that had not yet been considered, so that first insights of its potential can be communicated to people of interest and that first (sub) results are gained more quickly. In addition, the abstraction of the problem, that must be solved, can be defined on various levels and therefore the abstraction offers chances to estimate required efforts and time. Of course, once a phenomenon of nature is identified and must be understood in detail, time is required to carry out the appropriate research. In this context, companies must be well aware that BID is not a shortcut to ready-to-use solutions, but it can offer various benefits for the company. As such, if a company is willing to invest time and money, BID offers the potential for not only incremental, but also, potentially, disruptive innovation. In addition, new markets can be entered once a phenomenon of nature is well understood and it becomes possible to transfer it  
Figure 5: Duration of the commercialization of 33 BID products in years. Phase 1: concept to prototype; phase 2: prototype to market. to technology. This raises the question about how BID projects can be successfully integrated into business models and how they can be managed effectively. In order to find out which process of BID (solution-based or problem-driven) was used for the development of BID products, we analyzed the BioM Innovation Database with regard to the time needed to develop prototypes and to enter the market of the respective cases, as summarized in Table 2. Most of the products, documented in the BioM innovation Database, were developed using the solution-based approach in contrast to the problem-driven approach.