A project designed to help SMEs licence their new product ideas to multinational companies, has been launched by technology transfer company RTC North and its European partners.
Connect-2-Ideas will help reduce the time it takes multinational companies to get new products to market, while providing an easier route to global markets for smaller companies.
Piloted as a Pan European project, Connect-2-Ideas will allow product hungry multinationals to tap into a powerful database of new product opportunities available for licence from SMEs and research bodies.
Project manager Carolyn Dougherty explained:
“Increasingly, multinational companies are adopting ‘open innovation’ strategies which recognise the wealth of technologies available for transfer from SMEs and R&D bodies in Europe.
“And the potential for companies to acquire innovations already developed is vast.”
Run by a consortium of partners in the UK, Italy and Germany, which includes Procter & Gamble, the pilot programme aims to maximise trans-national technology transfer opportunities in Europe.
“The EU is focussing significant resource on helping more European companies benefit from technology transfer, increase the pace of new product development and improve their competitiveness in the global economy.”
The Connect-2-Ideas programme has been designed to meet this challenge. Managed by Sunderland based technology consultancy RTC North, the programme draws on large company experience in exploiting open innovation and licensing technologies from external organisations.
“Using a sophisticated online database supported by a network of hands on technology transfer specialists, the service will match companies with technology needs to those with technologies available for licence.”
Connect-2-Ideas will also test new technology transfer approaches with participating companies in order to build a model for best practice throughout Europe.
“The outcome will be a more vibrant technology transfer landscape in Europe, which will generate more commercially viable partnerships between small organisations in Europe and multinational companies. The benefits for innovative European technology organisations will be significant.”
For more information on Connect-2-Ideas, please contact Martin McGurk at RTC North on 0191 516 4400 or email martin.mcgurk@rtcnorth.co.uk.
RTC North managing director, Gordon Ollivere MBE, said of RTC North’s newest project:
“This is an important programme that will be of enormous benefit to European SMEs and R&D bodies by giving them a truly global reach to multinational companies who need technologies to support new product development. The multinationals will benefit by increasing their access to technology from smaller organisations through a new channel.”
Open Innovation...
Feeding new product opportunities to its clients, RTC North can also provide outsourced scouting services for multinationals.
Already working with 20 multinational companies, we help identify technologies which can be developed into marketable products.
RTC North’s Open Innovation Programme works with clients to build a profile of their interests and actively search our networks and data sources to identify technologies which may be relevant.
Slashing the time it takes to get new products to market, ‘open innovation’ policies are saving multinational corporations millions on research and development.
And by sourcing new product opportunities from external sources, in recent years companies such as IBM, Fujitsu and BT have embarked on a major rethink of their innovation process.
As a result many companies have come to rely as much on external researchers as on their own in-house R&D departments.
One of the major problems that companies face when embarking on an open innovation programme is that they often lack the networks, resources and skills required to seek and identify relevant technologies.
As one of Europe’s leading technology brokerage companies, RTC North has operated in this field for over 15 years.
P&G has recently stated that their open innovation programme – Connect and Develop – which has increased R&D productivity by 60%, and helped launch over 100 new products.
A case study of Open innovation...
“Through RTC North, Procter and Gamble has been given access to a vast selection of new technology and research opportunities from across Europe”
Barry Stoddart, Research Fellow, P&G
In 2000, realizing that P&G couldn't meet its growth objectives by spending more and more on R&D for less and less payoff, newly appointed CEO, A.G. Lafley, challenged the company to reinvent their innovation business model. Lafley made it their goal to acquire 50% of innovations outside the company.
In 2004 Procter and Gamble launched a new line of Pringles potato crisps with pictures and words printed on each crisp.
Previously, the company would have shouldered all of the investment and risk internally and waited up to two years to bring this product to market.
By applying a fundamentally new approach to innovation, the company was able to accelerate ‘Pringles Prints’ from concept to launch in less than a year and at a fraction of what it would have otherwise cost.
They created a technology brief that defined the problems they needed to solve, and circulated it throughout their global networks of individuals and institutions to discover if anyone in the world had a ready−made solution.
It was through RTC North’s European network that they discovered a small bakery in Bologna, Italy, run by a university professor who had developed the technology they had been looking for.
He had invented an inkjet method for printing edible images on cakes and cookies which was rapidly adapted to solve the problem.
This innovation has helped the North America Pringles business achieve double-digit growth over the past two years.