Successful commercialization of hardware products is essential to combating climate change with renewable energy technologies, screening for disease with medical diagnostics and devices, and increasing production efficiency with robotics, among many other critical applications. Unfortunately, hardware product development (PD) is often less attractive to investors due to the barriers of long commercialization timelines and large upfront investment. In Fig. , the years to exit (merger, acquisition, or initial public offering) for cleantech, medical, and software sectors are compared for the years 2006 to 2011 .