Research Management Consulting

Research Management is a generalized process with the following stages:

1. Continuing fundamental research projects at universities and government laboratories to discover new materials and refine knowledge of the laws of mathematics, physics, chemistry and the composite sciences of biology, Earth sciences, forest sciences, agriculture and environmental sciences. This is a holistic enterprise, which produces economically interesting outcomes about 10 per cent of the time.

2. Exploring real world applications for new knowledge to bridge the gap between academic science and industry. About 1 in 10 of these proof of concept projects show promise for real world products and services.

3. Scaling-up technologies that show promise (usually several times) to see how they perform under small scale, but large enough to assess some preliminary economics.  Only 1 project in 10 succeeds in showing promise for a real world application.

4. Scaling-up successful concepts for pre-production pilot for large scale testing and economic assessment.  This is a very costly stage, however the survival rate is still only 1 in 3.

5. The final testing stage is pre-commercial demonstration. Commerciality it is defined as at least two full years (preferably 5 for large scale industrial technologies) to prove the technology to the marketplace. 

This is a time-linear process that is both rigorous and expensive. It gets expensive when steps are skipped, forcing re-working designs and often the concepts behind them. The truly disruptive technologies survive the process after much development time and numerous improvement cycles to take over their market niche.

 Direct any specific questions you may have to info@marmotresearch.ca.