Science|Business and TekScout, a service of the open innovation services company UTEK Corporation, are linking up to make information available to each other’s readers. The service, which will be available soon, will provide Science|Business readers with news of opportunities to solve innovation challenges in the US, and TekScout readers with a live news feed of developments in technology transfer, R&D investment and innovation policy in Europe.
TekScout helps companies look outside of their internal R&D department to better address the challenge of completing complex development projects. The TekScout Open Innovation Network enables companies to post complex development projects, along with a reward and timeline required to solve the problem, in a secure environment. A worldwide network of qualified scientists and engineers, including Sciene|Business readers, can view these challenges and earn rewards for providing unique solutions.
“UTEK, the parent company of TekScout, has a unique capability to bring companies (TekScouts) and scientists (TekExperts) together, based on our deep-seated relationships with hundreds of companies and relationships with over 2,000 academic institutions around the world,” said Edward Weisberg, VP and General Manager of TekScout. “We are able to leverage these existing relationships to help ensure that we have the best and the brightest scientists available for companies that are looking for serious solutions to their challenges. TekScout also helps qualified scientists and engineers find R&D challenges that utilise their problem solving capabilities while providing a financial and intellectual reward for winning solutions.”
TekScout challenges are focused in the disciplines of Life Science, Physical Science, Chemistry, Engineering and Design, Maths and Computer Science, and Alternative Energy and Sustainable Products.
“Over the past ten years UTEK has built a global reputation for sourcing technologies for our clients. Now, in addition to providing technology sourcing, strategic consulting and patent analytics, we can offer clients the ability to outsource their development challenges to bring products to market faster, cheaper, and more effectively through a comprehensive Open Innovation programme,” added Clifford M. Gross, CEO of UTEK. “We believe that our goal of becoming the world’s first turnkey provider of open innovation services is further enhanced with the launch of TekScout.”
A 2006 Harvard Business School Study entitled “The Value of Openness in Scientific Problem Solving”, by Lakhani, Jeppenson, Lohse, and Panetta, found that presenting scientific problems to the outside community enabled several large R&D-intensive firms to solve over one-third of the problems that they had been unable to resolve internally. The study also found that the most successful solutions came from experts that are at the boundary, or outside of their specific fields of interest, indicating the importance of reaching outside of your organisation to successfully innovate.
The TekScout Open Innovation Network can be viewed at www.tekscout.com. Science|Business is an independent news and events service, focused on R&D investment and policy in Europe. It publishes online daily at www.sciencebusiness.net, and produces numerous special print reports, studies and conferences. It was founded in London and Brussels by Richard L. Hudson, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, and Peter Wrobel, former managing editor of Nature. It works with a network of five professional organisations and ten universities: Chalmers University of Technology, ETH-Zürich, Imperial College London, Karolinska Institutet, ParisTech, Politecnico di Milano, TU Delft, University of Cambridge, University College London, and the University of Warwick.
UTEK Corporation is a leading Open Innovation service company. UTEK’s services enable clients to become stronger innovators, rapidly source externally developed technologies and create value from their intellectual property. UTEK is a business development company with operations in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel and Portugal. For more information about UTEK, please visit its website at www.utekcorp.com.
Receive the Funding Newswire each Tuesday, our Policy Bulletin each Thursday, and news about bridging Europe’s east-west innovation gap twice a month in The Widening. 
A unique international forum for public research organisations and companies to connect their external engagement with strategic interests around their R&D system.