Innovation Funnel for R&D Ventures

This article is about how to converge, select and develop R&D project ideas for products, technological solutions and services development for commercial success, including elements of concrete R&D project design.

Stage 1: Organisation's Innovation Strategy

• Internal technology or products roadmap: the internal technology or product roadmap of the organisation, where the organisation wants to develop its future competitive technologies and products.
• Research portfolio (including projects and products): innovation thesis, existing portfolio of research projects, products and services available to exploit further into future developments.
• Innovation agenda: innovation priorities, needs or plans for the organisation: expansion, product improvements, disruptive solutions development, exploring new technologies, applications, markets or new business models.
• Existing background intellectual property: portfolio of existing background IPRs and knowledge-based assets.
• Internal capacities and resources: the organisation's internal teams, expertise, resources, labs and R&D capabilities.

Stage 2: Ideas and Concepts Development

• Ideas development, brainstorming and TRL positioning: ideas development and brainstorming workshops; identifying and positioning TRL levels of different ideas.
• Alignment with organisational strategy: aligning ideas with the organisation's strategy and innovation agenda.
• Alignment with investor, funding body, call or customer request: aligning ideas with investor expectations (for privately funded projects and startup ideas), with funding body expectations and call topics (e.g. H2020, IUK, RFPs), or with the description of work from customer requests.
• Problem exploration and need analysis: evaluating ideas on the potential of which one better solves the relevant problem.
• Customers identification and expectations: identifying potential users and customers of the proposed solution, their expectations and how they would use it (design thinking / human-centred design methods).
• Competition and state-of-the-art analysis: which market or technological gap the proposed idea will cover. If you are developing a solution for a saturated market, the proposed idea has to work better than competitors.

Stage 3: Concept Exploration

• Value chain and supply chain development: value chain development of the R&D project idea, connecting all components of the project, and implementation plan development. Based on the value chain and project components, choosing and developing the associated supply chain including partners, suppliers and agents.
• Concept-customer fit: during supply chain development, brainstorming and validation with end users or customers regarding the R&D idea and customer fit. The more interviews the better to further develop the idea; lean approaches can be one way to validate it.
• Innovation development and business model: unique selling points, unique benefits, value and innovation, differentiation factors, and unique non-technological innovations or business models where relevant.
• Risks and challenges analysis: which challenges and risks are involved in realising your innovative idea; complete analysis and a plan to mitigate them or a contingency plan, plus risk impact analysis on resources and budgets.
• Solution value creation and impact analysis: how the concept will create value for customers or users, and what benefit and impact it will have.

Stage 4: R&D Project Concept Finalisation

• Problem-concept-impact fit: connecting the dots, making sure of the problem-concept-impact fit for your R&D project.
• Problem-concept quantification: problem and project concept quantification. To what extent are the identified customer problems addressed by the developed R&D solution?
• Concept-impact quantification: R&D solution and impact quantification. What are the benefits derived by using the developed solution to solve the identified problem, and its positive impacts on customers?