Partner Article

Innovation: How to see the wood from the trees

Chris Warkup, Chief Executive of the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), explains how a conversation with the KTN can help ’see the wood from the trees’ and help your company remain productive while fuelling strategic innovation.

Build your network to fuel innovation

There is a very urgent economic imperative for sharing knowledge because the life-span of what we understand to be cutting-edge technology is shortening all the time. We need to connect business with research at a faster rate than ever before, or we run the risk of knowledge becoming obsolete before we have been able to roll it out across all sectors – or perhaps even all departments in a company. Yet the interdisciplinary nature of innovation means that these connections might need to be made in places that aren’t immediately apparent and between sectors who would not usually talk to one another.

The UK’s science base is feted all over the world, but historically we haven’t always maximised the potential of those discoveries. As many entrepreneurs will know the relationship between strategic innovation and ‘ideas-chasing’ involves a careful balancing act and varies depending on the size of business (whether you’re a start-up or well-established).

Avoiding a ‘scatter-gun’ approach

For start-ups this balancing act requires a single-minded strategic focus while keeping an eye on new markets and opportunities. A company only driven by its curiosity could be drawn to new application areas, yet may find itself wasting a lot of resource on what is really no more than a ‘scatter-gun’ approach. If this becomes the predominant strategy it will find that products will not be delivered to market fast enough. Yet it’s also true that the first market application of a new technology, and its first cash flow, is sometimes from a market application that wasn’t envisaged in the initial thinking.

Share your problems

The KTN helps businesses clarify and articulate their challenges to those who might have solutions or showcase new technologies to potential markets. We encourage those from different research fields and industrial sectors to share knowledge, generate commercial ideas and apply expertise in new ways.

Set out what you want to achieve

A well-established business requires a more strategic approach to cross-sector innovation. Actively planning the role of novel technology in business development is a patently better approach than simply being reactive. The KTN helps by raising awareness of road-mapping approaches as part of industrial strategies and also works to raise awareness of competing or potentially disruptive technologies. This does not mean, however, that there is never a value in responding to opportunities and bright ideas that don’t fit the strategy. We must remember that a good business will gather the right information and will exercise appropriate judgment.

The amount of effort and public funding we put into creating intellectual value in the UK is not matched by what we put into capturing value for the UK from science and creativity. Following the reorganisation of the KTNs in April this year from 14 into one single KTN with Technology Strategy Board funding we have the best possible chance of facilitating connections to overcome this – especially those connection involving not the usual suspects. It is creating a single national network covering all technologies and doing away with silos. It helps by facilitating collaborations and will help businesses interact with wider support; such as accessing Technology Strategy Board funding or investment finance for innovative growing business.

Connecting the people who accelerate innovation

We help companies to identify and develop the ideas, expertise and technologies, wherever they reside, which have the potential to be world-beating products, processes and services. We work closely with the Technology Strategy Board and with the Catapults to help manufacturers navigate this process.

We want knowledge to be the force behind productive science and creative innovation in the UK and increasing the UK’s capacity for innovation we can help both SMEs and large blue chip companies innovate concurrently, without helping one at the expense of the other. The KTN is all about connecting the people who can accelerate innovation in order to deliver new products, processes and services that solve problems and grow our UK economy.

Enabling collaboration: How we helped a UK start-up break into the £70bn food packaging market

This year the Knowledge Transfer Network helped a start-up company producing sustainable packaging to demonstrate how to cut supermarket’s landfill costs and impact by replacing paper with straw.

Valueform uses waste straw and straw composites instead of paper or plastic to make disposable packaging that is both cheaper and more sustainable than alternative materials used today. From disposable medical products for the NHS, to safer food packaging, Valueform’s ability to create materials that are both environmentally friendly and which underpin public wellbeing is attracting attention from a huge range of industries. There has been particular attention from supermarkets, which are taxed according to their volume of food production waste sent to landfill.

To get to this stage Valueform has had to prove its credibility to a range of partners and prospective customers. The KTN has played an instrumental role in this process. It recognised the business’ potential and connected the founders to representatives from academia, government and industry that could act as an ecosystem of support around Valueform from across these sectors. The credibility the KTN’s support provides has opened new doors to large organisations including multi-nationals and UK supermarkets, that Valueform would simply never have been able to access alone, helping them find partners such as Bangor University that have given them the credibility and support to secure more than £2m of Government funding for collaborative research that will help commercialise Valueform’s products.

Chris Warkup is Chief Executive of the Knowledge Transfer Network

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Chris Warkup .