Whether it is a start-up company, SME, or large corporation, cash is always in short supply and getting value for money remains essential. Over the past few years, this challenge has been addressed by the development of “lean” techniques such as “lean start-up”, “lean manufacturing” and “lean product development”. Over this period, Qi3 has been applying “lean” thinking to marketing, developing new methodologies that adopt the “lean” philosophy and adapting existing methodologies to more closely match the evolving needs of our clients. These services and methodologies include:
Rapid Market Prototyping (RMP)
Qi3 Rapid Market Prototyping is an iterative process that addresses the complexity underlying a simple business challenge:
- Which markets should I address?
- What products will they buy?
- Why?
- How do I accelerate sales growth?
It is an iterative process that enables market strategies, product development programmes, ‘go-to-market’ plans, and sales growth strategies to be developed, tested, and implemented with real potential customers in very short timescales.
This revolutionary lean business methodology puts the customer at the heart of these processes, transforming their effectiveness and resulting in faster time to market, more compelling products, and higher sales growth.
‘Cash Neutral’ Market Research and Insights
Understanding clearly market needs, drivers and what customers want to buy is a fundamental prerequisite to commercial success. Qi3 has developed its Technology Market Evaluation (TME) methodology to address these very questions. In-depth market research, discussions with Key Opinion Leaders, and identification of early sales prospects combined with Qi3’s knowledge bank and extensive commercial experience give clear market insight from which we develop proposals on key strategies for commercial success. Armed with this clarity of understanding and direction, the company can steer a focused and rapid path to commercial success.
The ‘cash neutral’ element comes from an effective strategy to exploit different funding sources for commercialisation of innovation. Innovate UK has a number of excellent part-funded schemes and Qi3 has developed a methodology for projects where the client’s contribution is funded in kind rather than in cash.
Securing Innovation Finance
Qi3’s team supports tens of millions of pounds in transactions each year to help companies to gain sales, R&D, contracts, grants, and sometimes debt or equity financing. Qi3 and Qi3 Ventures have extensive experience across a full range of challenges facing organisations wanting to become more resourceful in terms of innovation activities.
Acquire Technologies and Companies
To identify the best opportunities for technology and company acquisition requires excellent industry insight and professional execution skills. Qi3 has extensive experience which can uncover the full potential of the technologies and undertake technical due diligence.
Please view our case studies to see examples of our work.
It is self-evident that the least objective assessors of a disruptive technology are the incumbent developers, immersed as they are in the practicalities of commercialisation, and we needed independent scrutiny from without. Qi3 brought us a rigorous approach and a sound model. Their questioning of our planning and market knowledge was intensive and insightful, and built both on technological understanding and significant experience. The result was a clear understanding of where our value lay, and a shared ownership of these models, as they had been built, with Qi3 guidance, within NanoSight.