Research

HOW TO do SUCCESSFUL Projects in RESEARCH?

You have a career research and teaching. Writing articles and conference papers is what you do on a daily basis. Having scientific dialogue with fellow academics is what makes your day. There are, however, some activities related to research work that are taking a big part of your time.

Funding Applications

To make research happen you are writing a lot of funding applications, doing project management and finding the best partners to join your network. That forces you to do research on evenings and week-ends. Get a life!

We offer research and innovation management services to academics and research teams. We take away the bureaucracy, manage your project and help you build a team with more funding for research. There are many ways for European wide collaboration in this field.

Co-creation with companies

Taking the first step is easy. We can co-write a funding proposal and get things going. When we get the project funded you can focus on research and we help in management issues. We can take care of tasks like: industry collaboration, dissemination, impact, project management and reporting. Planning for a follow-up happens from day one, or at least in the middle of the project. So, what next?

Co-innovation with industry

We can help you prepare an industrial co-innovation project that allows you to grow the network and build a focused research team to make an impact. Best way is to co-innovate with big industry. Again you will focus on doing research, collecting data, writing articles and going to conferences to present your findings. Now, how much fun is that?

Finding project partners, especially private SME and large companies, is part of the hard work that we can do together. You are not alone. Only a few digital handshakes away are decision makers that build large scale industrial research collaborations and big European programs. Stepping into those circles will help you do a long term research plan and projects that are going for several years, instead of jumping from one project to the next with part-time grants and temporary assignments. The quarterly reporting in science is 25 years, so, let’s make a plan and do the networking for a roadmap that you can live with.

Commercialisation from Research to business

Research based spin-offs are the best. Deep tech, future and emerging research and new inventions that aim from lab to market. But it is a lot of meditation and hard work before big decisions. How should you make up your mind… going for the startup life or staying in academia?

We can help you. The options for commercializing research to business are: new inventions, licensing to companies or creating a spin-off and taking the entrepreneurial leap of faith to build a startup.

But perhaps you rather write a book about it? That sounds perfect. You can do it. Our networks can offer and introduce commercial experts and business designers with the relevant skills to complement those of your academic research team. If you need an entrepreneur to commercialize your invention, do market intelligence, perform a patent analysis or organize customer focus group interviews – that will happen.

Despite all the doubts, hard work … and a lot of mediation… successful projects on commercialization of research results can produce outstanding results. You have the potential to change the world. But you do not have to do it alone.

You can continue on academic research or make a career shift towards the corporate life. In both cases – we can help you with the process.

Proof-of-concept

Research starts from a question in a theoretical framework. It moves on to empirical trials and evidence-based findings that can, or perhaps not, produce positive outcomes. It is the same with a business concept.

Business starts with a customer problem and a target market. It moves on to finding possible solutions to that problem. It produces, or perhaps not, a new product or a service concept. This concept needs to be proven, just like your scientific hypothesis. Like research management, business and innovation management follows well known processes and methods.

One of them is called a proof-of-concept: An idea level business concept (hypothesis) is presented to potential clients (sample data) and iterated (tested) to produce a business outcome (result) that has a market need (peer-review). That’s simple, right?

However, the business case for a proof-of-concept might be profitable or not. Value of research is in producing new knowledge – at some point. Value of business is in producing a profit – at some point.

A great team might manage to succeed with an idea that someone earlier had failed miserably. But if there is no profit the concept is not proven. Consider publishing an academic paper that you are re-writing for a journal – yet another time – after a round of revisions. You are confident that it gets published (e.g. the business of creating new knowledge is profitable) with another try to another journal (selected target market). You need to think it through, again and again, with a little tweaking here and there. You must review the data-sets and run analysis once more. Perhaps it proves valuable in the end? As you see, the world of research and business have a lot more in common than you thought. The interest and inquiry into new ideas that perhaps could work – is a shared value between research and business.

Coaching for success

Are you ready to be applying for this call? And perhaps starting a journey together? Propellerhat Coaching for research professionals – is a continuously open call where you can apply today and get instant feedback.

Want to learn more? Let’s book a free 1 hour online session today. During that time we will discuss about your research goals – and making a societal impact.