Eureka! Quest

 

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Connect + Develop

 

Eureka! Quest discovers, cleans and screens inventions and small businesses for corporate acquisition, licensing or joint venturing.

 

Key sources of content include:

  1. Small business owners via the 1,400 NIST/MEP field agents across all 50 states
  2. Outbound networking among the 700 Federal Labs and 653 research Universities and
  3. Outbound networking with the world’s top inventor web sites, radio and TV programs and hundreds of inventor groups in the USA, Canada and UK.

 

The translation process has three key criteria:

  1. That the idea is a genuinely big idea (top Quintile of BASES or Merwyn Research)
  2. The owner actually owns the key enabling technology and 3) The owner is reasonable to do business with (we can’t waste time on “unrealistic crazies”).

 

At Procter & Gamble Connect + Develop has helped double growth from innovation. The P&G annual report explains “Connect + Develop is proving to be an enormous source of innovation and competitive advantage. We’re innovating faster, better and more cost effectively as a result of external partnerships. More than half of the new products in our pipeline today include at least one external component.”

 

At General Electric net income from partnerships is growing at twice the rate of the base business. Jeffrey Immelt, G.E.’s CEO says “we’ve learned that it’s better to partner.” Mark Little director of G.E. Corporate Research has focused his researchers on finding small companies that have “technologies that we cannot master on our own, and into which we want visibility.”