Assessing investment in innovation is a tough issue for manufacturing SMEs who need to ask themselves critical questions.
How do you select an area of research?
How does the company decide which new products and processes to pursue?
How do they select the investment?
Similarly, investors and governments need to answer certain questions.
How do they decide which companies to invest in?
How does a government decide which technology to back?
How does a venture capitalist decide which idea or start up to back?
How does a private equity firm decide where to invest?
How good is private equity at backing start-ups and innovation?
How do private equity firms justify their massive fees?
Do private equity firms actually deliver above average returns?
And if they do, how good are they at picking start up and innovation winners?
All these are difficult questions and the AMCRC sees its role as helping SMEs innovate and commercialise their ideas. In the New Year therefore we are starting a program training SME manufacturers on what we call the innovation process. It’s a formal process and by following the formal process, it takes a lot of the risk out of investing in R&D and makes it more of a sure bet than it is at the moment for a lot of companies.
The innovation management process goes through everything: idea generation, idea selection, protection of intellectual property (IP), IP strategies, relating the IP strategy to the business plan and execution. It will be a very practically oriented program which will be delivered by practitioners, businesses with experience, rather than theorists. If the company is focused on new product and process development, this program will assist them in pursuing that more systematically and with less risk. If they can evidence they have followed our process, it will stand them in better stead in terms of investors or any provider of loans or subsidies.
The program will provide answers to those key questions. Businesses interested in any aspect of this can get in touch with us.
