Tools to Identify Potential Collaborators and R&D Partners

The innovators asked some excellent questions during the training I gave at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center earlier this week. One thing that they wanted to know was how to identify potential partners. How could they find out which organizations were at the cutting edge in various technology disciplines?

This is an excellent question. Here were some suggestions that I provided back to the innovators, based on some of Fuentek’s sources for competitive intelligence:

• Trade publications for the particular discipline, such as ECN: Electronic Component News or Chemical & Engineering News
• University newsletters, such as Technology Review published by MIT
• Meetings for the relevant industry, such as the many IEEE conferences and events
• Industry market reports from organizations such as Frost & Sullivan and Datamonitor can be expensive, but often you can access free “nuggets,” such as company lists and overarching market numbers and trends, in the freely provided tables of contents and press releases announcing the reports
• Journals, such as Nature Biotechnology
  

What are some of your favorite sources for potential technologies and collaborators?

–By Nannette Stangle-Castor, Ph.D.