Economic Accompanying Research for a Technological Research Project

At the beginning there was the idea – the idea of a professor and his research team to apply an existing position technology to new, innovative fields of application by combining it with complementary technologies, thus enhancing its level of awareness and application. A consortium made up of different expertise was established to seek for EU funding for the realisation of this promising idea. Due to our long lasting experiences in the field of navigation and the associated large network, the contact to HiTec Marketing was quickly made. Yet, we were on our way to Bern to jointly forge the proposal. The research proposal was positively evaluated by the EC and collective work could start.

Within the course of the project the main task of HiTec Marketing consisted in the business and socio-economic accompaniment of the technological development. Our contribution was particularly required with respect to the provision of a market perspective primarily in view of a successful introduction of the developed system and thus enabled applications to the European user-community. Besides the identification of user requirements, monitoring of technology acceptance and the development of business models for promising applications, we elaborated tailored exploitation and dissemination strategies with regard to the usage and diffusion of research results. In this context our ability to communicate both economic and textual aspects to the Commission turned out to be of special value. In difficult times HiTec Marketing even undertook moderation and management tasks.

Finally, our efforts were rewarded by a successful completion of the project, which was also accordingly appreciated by the Commission. In this connection in turn our task was to represent the research results to the Commission in an intelligible form. Also now we are in contact with major players of the consortium to further advance the idea and the underlying technology.