Whether you are an entrepreneur starting-up or the leader of an established business, a solid understanding of the available sources of capital and today's expected rate of return for capital is the fundamental step in crafting a financing and fund raising strategy.

Given strategic buyers with large cash reserves, a better financing environment for private equity, and an improved macro-environment, M&A activity in 2014 is more robust than in previous years. In the vertical market segments employing photonics technologies as core differentiators, a trend of premium priced, strategic acquisitions persists through 2014.

The M&A market for development stage and high growth life science and healthcare businesses enabled by Biophotonics is robust. So far in 2014, there are more than 100 transactions. Transactions are researched with closing, effective, or announce dates from January 1 to September 2, 2014. Transactions volumes, values, geographies, and market segments are analyzed. Values are in $US at historical rates of exchange.

When start-up or growth capital is not available or at a very high cost, harvesting your technology early is a feasible strategy - even for high technology ventures requiring substatntial assets and working capital, a highly specialized and expensive workforce, and years to bring its first products to market. It is often, however, a last resort - considered only after burning through many months shopping business plans to venture capital firms, lenders, or those at established corporations managing the R&D budget. Instead, consider bootstrapping and harvesting your most valuable asset - your technology - for cash, strategic customer relationships, market intelligence, application know-how and more.