Eco-Innovation: New Business Development on sustainable technologies
Over 20 years ago, when B&W started as Willems & van den Wildenberg in The Hague we specialised in the new and upcoming domain of New Business Development (NBD). Where most companies were concentrating on performing R&D to innovate, our view was (and is) that all R&D trajectories should be accompanied by a parallel business development trajectory. Performing NBD in parallel to R&D makes it possible to iteratively adapt the technology to the business model and vice versa, assuring a best possible business-technology combination. Nowadays, as Bax & Willems, our focus has shifted to Open Innovation involving multiple actors in collaborative research and business development. But the basic philosophy remains: to improve chances of market success at the end of the pipeline, it is crucial develop the business model together with the technology.
Still, many government- and EU programmes to stimulate innovation including the are still mainly focused on traditional (collaborative) R&D. Though these programmes are important, they do not contribute to addressing the European Innovation Paradox: we're great at developing new technologies (R&D), but bad at bringing them to the market (NBD). With this in mind, it was a therefore positive surprise to be at the Eco-Innovation event in Brussels. Instead of supporting innovation through R&D, this programme is aimed at supporting business development of new sustainable technologies. This should be strongly complementary to existing R&D programmes such as FP7 and Eureka, and is a welcome addition to the current portfolio of EU programmes to support innovation.
In the successful execution of this programme, one prerequisite that needs to be met that is different for this programme than those focused on R&D: that those presenting projects are not just looking for funding to continue R&D development work, but are really eager to bring something new to the market. This requires a shift in participation from other R&D programmes: entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs instead of leading scientists and engineers. Will those entrepreneurial spirits with a newly developed sustainable technology please stand up?
