One of the things I really like about the CICP program is that they tag innovation to the technology readiness scale, which is something that we commonly use, even within our own company, to determine whether technology is ready for commercialization or not. It was very clear where it tagged. The improvement, I would say, though, is that.... There is almost a catch-22: to be really successful, you had to have a product that was ready for commercializing, but you couldn't have sold it yet. Companies arrive at that blessed period for hopefully the minimum period of time.
So I would suggest, as an improvement to the thing, that the concept of an innovation should also include products that may have had a few customers, not very many, because for that first three years of a new product's life cycle there's intense reworking of the product. I don't think that because you've sold one thing to somebody it should disqualify you from this program.