Lightwave Logic Inc (LWLG)

[Photonics_Guy]

The waiting game can be painful at times...but there is quite a process to go through to get to the point where a product becomes 'designed in'.

Here are a few headwinds a small company with disrupting tech faces:

1. The telecom/datacom industries are notoriously risk averse
2. Those industries have a built-in not-invented-here (NIH) avoidance syndrome
2a. Even if senior management is motivated to pursue a disruptive tech, lower-tier engineering management can see the tech as a threat to job security and stymie adoption
3. The testing to meet the myriad specifications and environmental qualifications with multiple devices takes a lot of time. Testing a single representative device is typically not deemed sufficient.
4. The large companies will try very hard to monopolize the disruptive tech by insisting on exclusive agreements
5. They will laboriously analyze the IP from the small company to see if there is any way to work around the small co's patent protection
6. They will make a series of low-ball offers to gauge the level of desperation the small company has to satisfy long-term shareholders and principals
7. They will make every attempt to starve the small company of cash
8. In the event a deal is struck, then there are many delays/steps in the design process:
- Kick-off meetings
- Draft requirements
- Draft qualification documents
- Capital allocation meetings/approvals
- Initial design phase
- Preliminary Design Reviews
- Critical Design Phase
- Critical Design Reviews
- Final Design Phase
- Special Tooling Requirements and leadtime
- Production Readiness Reviews
- Low-Rate Initial Production Run (LRIP)
- LRIP Reviews/Assessments
- Full Production and Implementation

While all of this sounds daunting, there is cause to be optimistic.

1. IMHO, LWLG has compelling, truly disruptive technology
2. They appear to me to have excellent patent protection
3. ML and team have been around the block in this arena. They are not naive to how big co's will attempt to manipulate and leverage
4. The tech appears to be licensable
5. The timeline to adoption appears to be contracting as data rates increase

A good article about disruptive tech adoption timelines is here.

An informative graph from the article.