Project description
Pairing business with science
Businesses often spend large amounts of time and money to find suitable scientific experts, funds, equipment, data, and materials to solve technological problems and support their research and development. Besides these needs, there is an increasingly pressing demand for scientific expertise and know-how to tackle issues related to climate change, pollution, food insecurity, increasing antimicrobial resistance of microbes, the emergence of AI, and other global challenges. The EU-funded QUESTPAIR project supports a feasibility study to implement a new online platform for bringing together companies and organisations with scientific experts within universities or research centres for consultancy and contract research projects.
Objective
Universities in Europe are generating an estimated €18 billion in revenues from contract research, consultancy, and use of facilities and equipment. This is expected to grow as urgent global challenges such as climate change create huge demand for new technologies, data, and materials. Also the EU and national governments are increasingly promoting academic-business collaborations to boost the knowledge economy. However, a remaining problem is that many businesses still have difficulty finding scientific experts, equipment, data, and materials across the globe. Whereas some online platforms exist to match business needs to freelance scientists, there is a lack of services to find expertise and assets for collaborations within universities and organisations, leaving a huge market largely untapped. Therefore, we are developing QuestPair, an online platform where businesses can post their scientific and technological needs, to which scientific experts can propose projects and suggest equipment, data and materials. Universities on QuestPair can directly participate in the negotiation of pricing and contracts. We believe that QuestPair could potentially facilitate around 6000 years of project work within the next 6 years, while reaching yearly revenues of ~€40 million. The QuestPair team combines research and data analysis skills with expertise in business, consultancy and software development. We are already developing a minimum viable product (MVP) and are receiving positive feedback from the scientific and business communities. This feasibility study aims to create a detailed picture of mediation/brokerage services that companies, scientific experts and universities need. We take an iterative approach, where we conduct questionnaires and market research, implement the results in the MVP, measure user response, and develop further. We explore different marketing strategies and evaluate several financial models to create a solid and detailed business plan.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
5462 GT VEGHEL
Netherlands
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.