Would you like to found, own, and lead a company that earns many billions of dollars because everyone loves its technology breakthroughs? If you are at all technically oriented, your day dreams of accomplishing such a feat probably keep you awake late into the night wrestling with how to achieve that enviable result.

It's a familiar dream, the details of which are constantly shifting. Long before the dot-com boom of the 1990s, technologists based in Silicon Valley, California, imagined themselves succeeding by pushing semiconductor and hardware speeds and capabilities to revolutionize the world with inexpensive portable computers and smart cellular telephones.

Today, the commercial potential of software applications for advanced communications technologies can be similarly exhilarating. Only time will tell what the next exciting technologies will be.

Let's look past the technologists' dreams into the reality. Over the past 30 years I've met hundreds of bright engineers and computer scientists who felt that they had found ways to make such stunning business successes through technology breakthroughs they intended to make.

In retrospect, almost all these people were quite wrong about what needed to be done: They misjudged the required tasks because they greatly overestimated how prepared they were to fulfill their dreams. As a result, their organizations crashed and burned pretty early in the process of developing the technologies.

I call this group "the dreamers." The stars in their eyes blocked out realistic views of the world around them and of themselves. These technologists focused on and were usually meeting their internal development targets until a huge problem arose from outside the company that eventually washed over their company like a tsunami does to a beach.

I've also met a handful of bright engineers and computer scientists who never stopped worrying about how to find out what they didn't know, about how to overcome extremely difficult future problems that they correctly anticipated, and about how to create exceptionally effective organizations. Most of these people eventually built organizations that earned billions from their successful technology breakthroughs.

I call this group "the energetic skeptics." They had no stars in their eyes, their vision being fixed instead on the huge challenges that continually threatened to wipe their fragile organizations off the map.

The difficulties facing aspiring technology entrepreneurs continually increase. At one time technologists only had to wow people like themselves who knew about, appreciated, and wanted the advantages of any technology improvements that could be produced.

Today, market acceptance cannot be taken for granted: The person being wooed to employ a new technology may have little interest in technology improvements beyond the immediate personal benefits they bring and may be unwilling to pay anything extra to obtain the new technologies.

As an example of the difficulties, consider Google, one of the great technology breakthrough successes of recent years. Yes, the founders did have a great idea for conducting online searches so that the top of the first page of retrieved sites was more likely to reveal a useful one.

Yet if Google hadn't also created a new business model built around inexpensive pay-per-click advertising that is very attractive to every business that needs more customers, the search breakthrough by itself wouldn't have earned the founders a living over the long run.

In addition to focusing on potential business-killing problems, being prepared to make new technology attractive to non-technologists, and establishing new business models to generate large revenue streams where little or none has existed before, today's technology entrepreneurs should also expect to combine more technologies than ever before and to deliver their offerings simultaneously in many countries with different cultures, languages, and technology practices.

Tomorrow's leadership challenges will probably be even greater as customers' and end users' fascinations with novelty will make product and service life cycles even briefer than they already are.

Despite technology leadership challenges growing to be more monumental, the size of successes will probably expand even faster due to competitors having an ever more difficult time responding to increasingly more fundamental and complex changes.

What does a technology entrepreneur need to be prepared to accomplish? Well, it's clearly not enough to simply be a great technologist. You also need to know how to turn technology into market-creating offerings that irresistibly draw everyone's interest. In addition, you should be a practical strategist who can rapidly design, build, and employ improved business models.

While developing technology, creating offerings, and switching to better business models, technology entrepreneurs also need the foresight and sensitivity of a prophet to anticipate and deal with major problems before they become insurmountable. Finally, these leaders need to attract and inspire the most talented people in the world to perform well in making the best of rapidly changing circumstances.

If more technologists realized all the things that they need to master to establish one of the great companies that they admire, they might work on self development before establishing a firm. After they realize the scope of the challenge and accept it, making the right preparations takes a lot of careful thought, effort, and focus.

To learn more about how to prepare let's examine the career of an entrepreneur who intends to build a major global enterprise based on his company's technology breakthroughs, Dr. Murali Vijendran. He was born with few family advantages, being the eighth child born to a civil servant in India.

Because he could not afford to attend the best schools, he made the most of the schools available to him and soon developed an admirable level of expertise in computer science that led to a Bachelor of Science degree. Wanting to assist his family financially, he took a job after graduation rather than continue with full-time studies.

Realizing that he needed more analytical skills, Dr. Vijendran added part-time management accounting studies to his busy workload and earned a master's degree by correspondence. He also appreciated the value of practical knowledge about law and economics and enrolled in a second part-time master's program while he continued to work on the first one. He also earned a master's degree in corporate and economic legislation.

With the benefit of the two master's degrees, he obtained a technology management job that gave him good exposure to process management and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). While in the new job, he added as many software certifications as he could to increase his technical knowledge and credibility.

Being aware of the global opportunities for entrepreneurial technologists, Dr. Vijendran left India for work in the United States to gain more experience in other cultures. That U.S. job, in turn, led to work in Singapore.

His experience helped him appreciate the high potential for careers in computer security, and he took a course in security implementation. That new knowledge helped him to gain an information security consultant position specializing in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance for one of the world's largest information technology companies.

With this background and experience, Dr. Vijendran felt confident that he could succeed as a senior management member of a technology company. His interests led him to make different plans: He wanted to start and lead a technology-based business venture.

How do you go from being a credible prospect for a job as a Chief Information Officer to becoming a successful world-class technology entrepreneur? He carefully examined his knowledge and experience to locate what he still didn't know enough about concerning technology entrepreneurship and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Rushmore University to fill in those gaps.

I had the honor of being one of Dr. Vijendran's professors, and he soon impressed me with his keen mind, broad curiosity, ability to learn, and focus on the most important tasks for technology entrepreneurs. Since graduating, his progress has been even faster. He now heads a cutting edge mobile applications company that is preparing to file 20 patent applications.

I caught up with him recently to gain a perspective on what his experiences can teach you. Earning a Ph.D. was an important step forward from his perspective because of the applied knowledge that he gained about technology entrepreneurship and the credibility that he gained in meeting and working with other technology leaders.

As a result, he gained confidence that he was prepared to launch a group of technologically advanced businesses. This new work has been tremendously satisfying, improving the quality of his personal life as well.

Here's how Dr. Vijendran summarized his advice for you concerning the potential value of a Ph.D. for your career as a high-tech entrepreneur:

"Decide on your mission and objectives. Then understand the relevance that a Ph.D. will have on those objectives. If there's a fit, then pursue the degree.

"It is also very important to ensure that your thinking gains depth as you complete the program. Some of the important qualities to be enhanced while completing the Ph.D. include the ability to contemplate, reflect, and set directions; expertise; deep thinking ability; and confidence in demonstrating your skills and rising to the occasion to solve technology/business problems."

He expects that his enterprises will reach substantial economic value in the next few years. I'll make it a point to check back with him to gather more lessons about how he accomplished that result after it occurs and share them with you.