Last Modified: December 2010 Document for Clients

IRAP Small Projects for Technology Validation

IRAP Support for Technology Validation Does your product reduce costs, increase revenues, open new markets, increase productivity, save time? It’s faster, stronger, cheaper, better, but how much does it actually help your customer? What is its measurable real-world value to your potential customers? How do you prove it?

IRAP supports technology validation to help SMEs whose technologies have passed the prototype stage

and now require real-world “early adopter” validation to measure value and prove the advantages of

their innovations to customers.

Proving the Value of Innovation

Technology validation provides an opportunity for innovative SME’s to work with an early adopter to

measure the real-world impact of their product or service and gather the proof needed to show the value

of their solution and encourage customer adoption.

IRAP Technology validation helps SMEs to conduct an experiment to measure the value of their product

to an early adopter to prove their innovation’s value to customers by helping them to:

Connect and work with appropriate early adopters

Test innovations in production environments

Conduct an experiment to measure the real-world value of their solution

Document the value of their product or service through a case study

Develop expertise in the deployment and value proposition of their products

The specific technology validation project depends on the needs of the firm but examples of the projects

that IRAP could contribute to include:

Measuring operational time savings or production increases

Measure cost reductions

Measuring customer reliability improvements

Measure effectiveness in meeting other measurable customer needs

Measuring changes in market size, reach or responsiveness

Other measurable criteria that overcome customer skepticism about the product or service’s

value proposition

IRAP Support

IRAP’s small technology validation projects support SME technical salaries to develop, conduct and

report on a 1 to 3 month experiment working with an early adopter to measure the impact (value) of the

SME’s solution on the early adopter’s business.

Requesting Technology Validation Support

All requests for technology validation support should be directed to an IRAP Industrial Technology

Advisor (ITA). Firms without an ITA should contact IRAP to find an appropriate advisor to work with

them.

Considering a Technology Validation Project

To ensure you are prepared for technology validation you should consider the following aspects of any

potential project:

Project Objectives

What is the overall purpose of the technology validation project for YOUR firm?

How will having a quantifiable measure of your value help your firm?

Measurable Value

What is the key competitive value customers should expect from your solution?

What are the specific customer criteria you will measure during this project (improved

productivity, cost savings, faster response time, client capacity increases etc) that will prove this

value to potential customers?

How will the results from the experiment prove the competitive value of your innovation to

potential customers?

Early Adopter Support

Identify the specific early adopter that will deploy the solution, how they will make use of the

solution and how they will evaluate the innovations.

The early adopter must agree to support the test by deploying the solution under real world

conditions and agreeing to allow the SME access to the data needed to support the test

The early adopter must agree to allow the measured results of the test to be used by the SME as

anonymous commercial validation of the innovation’s effectiveness. However the early adopter

is not required to give the SME permission to use or associate their name with the results, just to

publish anonymous results.

Project Plan

Outline the plan of work for the project. What tasks are required to prepare, deploy and conduct

the tests needed to measure the value of your solution?

What is the minimum solution you need to deploy and how representative would this be of a

typical customer deployment?

How will you measure before and after data to measure your solutions value?

How will you monitor the ongoing experiment?

How will you ensure the early adopter maximizes the value of your solution?

Project Outcomes

How will you use the results to the technology validation experiment to help commercialize your

innovation?