PowerPoint Presentation

[Audio] Welcome, and thank you for joining this training seminar: Commercialisation Strategies for Digital Agriculture Innovations. This session is part of TALLHEDA, and it has been designed for people who work where research and agriculture meet: researchers, project managers, technology transfer staff, agri-food entrepreneurs, cooperatives, and advisers. Let me begin with the single sentence that defines the next three hours. Our objective is to transform research outcomes into marketable products. Notice what that sentence assumes. It assumes that you already have something of value: a model, an algorithm, a sensor design, a dataset, a method, or a piece of know-how that came out of research work. It does not ask whether your science is good. It asks a different and harder question: what has to happen so that someone outside your laboratory, your project, or your institution chooses to use what you made, and chooses to pay for it? Over the next three hours we will follow that journey step by step. We will look at how ready your outcome really is. We will learn how to find and validate the customers who need it. We will look at how to protect and manage the rights around it, how to shape it into a business model with a sensible price, how to reach the market through partners and funding, and finally how to leave this seminar with a practical ninety-day plan. You do not need a business background to follow this seminar. You need one real research outcome in mind, ideally your own. Let us begin..

[Audio] Let me walk you through how this seminar is organised, so that you know what to expect and how to get the most from it. We will move through five modules. In Module 1, we start with a realistic look at the distance between a research result and a product, and we introduce tools to measure how ready your outcome is, both technically and commercially. In Module 2, we turn to customers. This is where many commercialisation efforts succeed or fail, because it is where we test whether anyone actually has the problem that your outcome solves. In Module 3, we deal with intellectual property and data rights: who owns what, how to protect it, and how to share it responsibly. This is particularly important in digital agriculture, where software, models and farm data are the core assets. After a short break, Module 4 is where we build the business model: how you create value, how you capture it, and how you price it. In Module 5, we look at the route to market: channels, partnerships, and the funding options available to take an outcome from prototype to product. We close with your personal ninety-day plan and time for questions. Now, a word about how to use this time. This is a working seminar, not just a presentation. At several points I will ask you to pause the video and complete a short exercise. Please do take those pauses seriously. The most valuable thing you can do today is to choose one real research outcome, from your own project, your own laboratory, or your own company, and apply every module to it. By the end, you will have a first draft of a commercialisation plan for that outcome, and that is worth far more than a set of notes about commercialisation in general. If you are watching this seminar alone, that works well. If you are watching with colleagues, even better: the conversation between a researcher, a business person and a user is exactly the conversation that commercialisation needs..

[Audio] By the end of this seminar, you should be able to do six things. First, assess how market-ready a research outcome is. That means looking at technical maturity, but also at the commercial side: customers, business model, rights, regulation and team. Second, identify and validate customers before you invest in building more. We will practise the habit of testing a commercial idea with real people early, when changing direction is cheap. Third, protect and manage intellectual property and data rights. You will learn how to map the assets you own, how different forms of protection work, and why checking ownership early, especially in collaborative research projects, saves enormous difficulty later. Fourth, choose a business model, a price, and a route to market. The same technology can support very different businesses, and choosing deliberately is one of the most important decisions you will make. Fifth, plan the funding and partnerships you need for the next stage, whether that is public follow-on funding, a licensing agreement, an industrial partner, or investment. And sixth, leave with a practical ninety-day plan: a short list of actions, with owners and evidence to collect, that you can begin the week after this seminar. Notice that none of these objectives is about learning more technology. You are already the experts on the technology. This seminar is about the other half of the equation, the half that turns knowledge into value that people will pay for..

[Audio] So why does commercialisation matter, and why now? Let me offer three reasons. First, value. Public money funds a large amount of agricultural and digital research. But a result that stays in a report, a repository, or a journal article creates knowledge, not yet impact. The impact that justifies the investment, whether it is higher productivity, lower environmental pressure, or better farm incomes, only appears when somebody adopts the result and uses it in practice. Commercialisation is the most reliable mechanism we have for making that happen at scale, because a product with a business behind it gets supported, updated, and improved over time, long after the research project has ended. Second, need. Farms and agri-food businesses across Europe are under pressure from several directions at once: volatile weather, difficulty finding labour, rising input costs, and growing expectations from regulators, retailers and consumers about sustainability and traceability. These pressures create demand for tools that help people decide better, work more efficiently, and document what they do. Digital innovations are well placed to answer that demand, but only if they reach users in a form that works for them. Third, expectations. Research funders, including the European Union through Horizon Europe, expect projects to plan for the use of their results, not only to publish them. The funding rules ask beneficiaries to think about how results will be exploited and disseminated, and the same logic applies to universities and research centres that want their work to matter beyond the academic community. All of this leads to one question that I would like you to carry through the whole seminar. Write it down, or keep it in front of you: who will use my result, and why will they pay for it? If you can answer that question convincingly, and with evidence, you are well on your way to a product. If you cannot yet, that is perfectly normal. Finding the answer is exactly what the next three hours are about..

[Audio] Thank you!. thank you!. TALLHEDA has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101136578. Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them..