Innovation Management
FED4SAE is not only about access to advanced technologies and industrial platforms. The objective of this program was to support selected companies in implementing strong business case to reinforce their market position and to adopt a relevant business model for value creation.
Accelerate your value creation
During your FED4SAE project, we worked hand in hand with the selected European organisations to aggregate all the relevant conditions for the success of their innovation up to its commercialization.
As part of the Innovation Management program, all the selected companies benefited from coaching sessions organised in three stages: 1) the strategic elements are discussed in the early stage, 2) then followed by questions related to the future execution of the product launch, 3) and finally the financial issues dealing with the return on investment, the roadmap consolidation and access to funding. The elements are challenged during a series of meetings with every company, tailored to every company’s perspectives and needs.
All the companies have deployed marketing effort to identify partners, or initiate contacts with customers. In some specific situations, a direct introduction with customers has been performed by the FED4SAE ecosystem of Research Organisation and Large Corporates.
Thanks to the customization of the support to the companies, FED4SAE has now an efficient process to support its sub-grantees. With a unique process, all the points of attention of the business case are covered, and the sub-grantees can receive either a full support or a dedicated one tailored on more specific actions.
FED4SAE and private investment for European companies
For companies looking for private investment, FED4SAE partners were able to assess project investment readiness and provide relevant support to reach achievements fitting with private investors’ expectations.
The support to fundraising has been intensified since 2020 with the 2 events organized: by Digital Catapult in London early February where 12 companies had the opportunity to pitch, and the INPHO Venture summit that took place on line in October 2020 where BLUMORPHO had the opportunity to introduce more companies looking for investors. This online event hosted the Smart Anything Everywhere (SAE) pitching competition, where various companies supported under the umbrella of SAE competed in front of a panel of investors. Protolab, supported in the frame of FED4SAE won the first prize. The company has developed an instrumented and connected brace to improve the monitoring of the condition for the doctors and the quality of life of patients.
FED4SAE virtual final event has been organized by BLUMORPHO on January 21st. It gathered FED4SAE granted companies, private and public funding players, European players to launch the FED4SAE club and unveil BLUMORPHO dedicated App new tool for 100% networking to increase the synergies and boost the FED4SAE ecosystem and enlarge it to Smart Anything Everywhere community.
Innovation Readiness after FED4SAE
KTH Innovation Readiness LevelTM is inspired from the well-known Technology Readiness Level scale. It is built around six focus areas with their own detailed status scales: Customer, Team, Business, IPR Funding and Technology and it provides structure and support for idea owners as well as coaches and managers in the development of an early stage idea to an innovation on the market.
In the frame of FED4SAE we used the KTH Innovation Readiness LevelTM as a mean to measure the progress of the supported companies at the end of their development.
Nearly all 32 granted companies accepted to answer to the questionnaire being interviewed by BLUMORPHO in order to measure and quantify FED4SAE impact through the innovation management and technical support.
All the companies have progressed during FED4SAE, the average starting IRL was 3.8 and it grew by 60% up to 6.2 (average progression of +2.4), 60% companies are above the average, and 40% below.
Not surprisingly, the Team Readiness and IP Readiness have the largest influence on the initial Innovation Readiness Level. Before the support of FED4SAE, these two elements alone can explain the initial measurement in innovation readiness. After the support of FED4SAE, the data analysis shows that the Customer understanding, the technology maturity and the Business model have shown the largest progression. Their evolution can be directly reflected on FED4SAE support and actions and are now very correlated.
