Interview with Eva García Muntion, director of RTDI, in the newspaper Expansión
On April 20, Eva Garcia Muntion, director of RTDI (Reserch Technology Development), spoke about the company in the newspaper Expansion, defining it as a company specialized in the creation and development of R&d or technological innovation for the launch of new products or services with market potential. “It deals from the Construction from the idea to the exploitation of the results. The aim is to generate growth through innovation (economic, social, scientific and environmental growth).”
INTERVIEW (Link to news: Expansion)
WHAT DO YOU OFFER YOUR CUSTOMERS? WHAT DOES YOUR ACTIVITY CONSIST OF?
We provide advanced services for the integral management of R&D&I projects. Since 2008, we have been working with our clients in the construction and direction of plans for the development and launch of new technologies and products with a strong focus on meeting needs.
We seek financing for projects and accompany their execution while maintaining the focus on the future exploitation of results. RTDI brings new solutions to the market and society, and generates strong growth opportunities. Our clients range from large companies to SMEs, start-ups or institutions. And the sectors are made up of Information and Communications Technologies, Life Sciences and Energy. We have a portfolio of more than 200 client companies, for which we have achieved more than 150 million euros of aid to projects built in cooperation.
WHAT EXACTLY DOES IT MEAN THAT THEY HAVE A STRONG FOCUS ON MEETING NEEDS?
Many projects have a strong technological character, so they have enormous potential. We help our clients to identify those needs and define the solution clearly differentiated from the possible alternatives. That need-solution pair is crucial; in our experience, it depends on around 40% of the chances of success of an R + D + i project. More than 60% of start-ups fail to continue beyond their first five years of life and identify as the main cause the lack of focus on a need for which the market is willing to pay.
COULD YOU DELVE INTO THE IDEA OF “INTEGRAL CONSTRUCTION OF R&D&I PROJECTS?
A project idea is much more than the dream of developing a new product. To begin with, it is important to abstract the great solution that the product will bring to a concrete, validated and sufficiently large need. We must continue to identify the key differentiating factors with respect to competitors. In addition, we need a good work plan, as well as develop a good marketing model. Product innovation “only” gives us a certain advantage time (1-2 years, 5 maximums if it is a really complex technology).
It is the business model that will make us grow beyond that time, and it is necessary to invest in developing it from the very moment of the conceptualization of the project.
Another of the great causes of non-continuity of start-ups is a wrong definition of the starting price and how to generate income and make them take off with respect to costs. Mistakes are made by building the project incompletely. They are, in fact, avoidable.
WHY IS THE DEEP STUDY OF THE ENVIRONMENT SO IMPORTANT?
Building and developing an R&D&I project and launching its results to the market implies a constant exercise of decision making. It is, therefore, essential to establish good processes that allow decisions to have a greater probability of success, and are not, in reality, “divinations”. These essential values must be accompanied by a systematic method of extracting the information relevant to the decision, its analysis and processing. to generate new knowledge, and its consolidation into a good basis for that intuition to flourish. It is what we call “informed creativity” or “studied creativity”.
HOW DO YOU DO ALL THIS IN RTDI?
In the last 5 years, we have invested a lot in defining a strong work methodology that we have validated with more than 150 clients and more than 300 projects. The result is an online platform that compiles all the work tools we need, integrating them together to generate strong synergies. Some of those tools are standard (e.g., the project Gantt), and others are proprietary notary-registered tools (e.g., what we call the “Idea Canvas,” the “quantified value proposition,” or the “revenue model definition panel”).
This platform is called INNOWIZARD, and we have recently opened it on the Internet for free use by the international community around R + D + i, especially that focused on Emerging and Future Technologies since it has become part of our activities in the PREFET project, funded by the EC. The PREFET project focuses on:
– Detect relevant trends in science and technology.
– Validate, enrich and integrate from these trends
– Motivate the creation of project ideas of great potential.
– Offer training with high added value.