With the help of Nytric, visionaries have been realizing the monetary value of allowing their imaginations to run wild.

For the last eight years, Nytric has taken the very thoughts that most of us shun as too crazy to be anything more than brain fluff, and nurtured them into some of the most innovative technological inventions on the market. From a sketch on a napkin to a fully-functional prototype, Nytric applies a unique business model when engineering product development and providing consulting services to creative thinkers across the globe.

“We found a very big void in the way that a startup company that is developing technology was being helped with a go-to-market strategy,” said Av Utukuri, Nytric founder and CEO.

According to Utukuri, startups experience difficulty due to a plan of action that is commonly resorted to, which consists of following one of the two available options.

“One is, I hire my own people, I train them and buy all the equipment and software while coming up with a huge amount of startup capital, or a lot of people choose to go find a consultant,” he said.

Utukuri said that the large financial expenditures resulting from the do-it-yourself option are also consequence when turning to a conventional consulting agency.

“It’s kind of like taking your car to the mechanic and saying ‘well how much is it going to cost me?’…you’re never going to get a straight answer. Every time there’s a problem, a bug fix, it’s more of ‘how much more can I charge you?”

In order to overcome the challenges associated with making the development of complicated innovative technologies for startups viable, Utukuri decided he needed to come up with an approach that was both progressive and workable.

“The concept that we came up with is something where we call ourselves ‘venture technologists,” Utukuri said. As venture technologists, Nytric engineers work to complement the role played by venture capitalists.

“When venture capitalists get involved, they are putting out know-how and money, We’re putting in technology, know-how and money,” Utukuri said.

“What we do is take new ideas from the concept napkin stage all the way to the front of the store,” he added.

Nytric’s support throughout the entire implementation process is enormously beneficial to venture capitalists, Utukuri said, as it eliminates the worry over who is going to govern each step of the process and what the associated costs will be.

“What happens when their product is done, or they move on to the next phase of the project, which may be more marketing intensive? They have to figure out what to do with the mechanical engineers who worked on the design for the last eight months,” he said.

However, when venture capitalists approach Nytric, they must be prepared to defend the proposed product’s position and its market practicability.

“A company comes in with an idea; we look at it and evaluate it like a venture capitalist would. We look at the business strategy and the go-to market strategy,” Utukuri said.

As long as the prospective client demonstrates sound knowledge of the channel and the product’s development phase, Nytric does not require them to present its technical viability. In fact, the company performs an entire feasibility assessment on its own.

Once the decision has been made to take a company on and an investment strategy has been established, Nytric does not ask their clients to concede more money as the implementation process goes on. “We don’t go back to the client and ask for any more money. The other situation is where companies go back and ask for more money every time something goes bump in the night,” Utukuri said.

Utukuri considers Nytric’s joint venture model a unique concept because as a company, Nytric can only make money when its client is successful.

“As a joint venture partner, we have a vested interest to allow the company to succeed and we’re not looking at it from a cash draw perspective. We act like their in-house technical team, but at a cap cost,” he said.

Utukuri noted that besides a viable business case, an addendum to Nytric criteria for securing a new client must be the presence of an idea like no other.

“Almost everything that we do is completely out-of-the-box and disruptive…we are always looking to get involved in things that have a technical and financial market risk,” he said.

One of its recent product launches, the Game Wave console, is described by Utukuri as a “Canadian twist on video games.” He posits Game Wave as the complete opposite to video games of the past that were targeted to a male demographic of 18 to 35, and designed for solitary play.

“It’s more like an interactive board game player, that allows for the whole family to pick up a handset and play games like Scrabble and Monopoly,” he said.

Utukuri believes that Canadian innovation is suffering due to a lack of private capital, which is inadequately supplemented through government funding, as well as his belief that Canadians exhibit a risk-averse character trait. In the same breath, he believes the potential for innovative thinking in the country is boundless.

“There are a lot of great ideas that come out of here. I think that per capita, we might be more innovative than our other countries.”

“In Canada, we don’t encourage innovation from avenues of helping these companies come to market,” Utukuri said.

According to Utukuri, Nytric is dedicated to awakening dormant ideas, and inspiring companies sitting on the fence to step off.

“This will only happen deal by deal. If we can’t make your company a success, there’s a good chance not many other people out there can.”

By Deanna Natalizio from Information Week