Blue Sky Venture Partners (BlueSky) is made up of a group of techno-entrepreneurs with extensive know-how and experience in commercialising research results. We cover the complete development process of bringing a new research finding to market from bench scale piloting to market and product development. We go as far as founding a start-up, securing funding for it and managing it to exit. We have
found that many South African researchers produce outstanding research results, but these results seldom translate to products. Commercialising research is challenging and without a strong pull from industry often require researchers themselves to become entrepreneurs (e.g. Prof Vivian Alberts, Solar Technologies). This is not ideal since good scientists are better at science than entrepreneurship. Blue Sky assists in bridging this gap between research findings and real world products. We specialise in both the soft and hard aspects of commercialisation. On the soft side we do route to market studies for professors. We develop customer strategies and conceive crossing the chasm strategies. We translate these into business case documents ready for use in securing follow on funding. On the hard side we are involved with bench scale piloting and up-scaling in materials and nanotechnology. We have designed constructed and run bench scale and full-scale pilot facilities to prove the techno-economic viability of a new technology. This information then gets used in the business case to secure venture funding and customers. Successes to date:
Blue Sky has been phenomenally successful and participated in more than 30 projects to date. Specific areas of services that we regularly provide to clients include:
Market research (route to market research studies)
These studies provide the researcher with information about the industry, market and potential customers for his/her technology. The studies start with conceiving the possible products in alignment with the customer needs in the market. The needs are identified from interviews with experts in the market and then lead to construction of an industry value chain. This is an iterative process to find matches interrogate and identify potential customers while changing the possible products that may be developed from the research findings. This leads to a techno-market match which can then be defined and used to secure funding for developing the product. New venture due diligences
Funding organisations like TIA, IDC and others make use of external consultants to complete business and techno-economic due diligences for them. We have completed many due diligences for such funding organisations and therefore have good insight into their evaluation processes. Funding
Based on our insight from due diligences we have been able to complete a number of funding applications for clients. These have received very positive feedback from funders in some cases being described as “the best application they have received”. Venture creation and licensing
Depending on the commercialisation model BlueSky participates in the end stage commercialisation of the opportunity and is currently managing one IDC backed new start-up venture, wile developing another. Furthermore we have been the principal negotiators of more than 20 license agreements for new technology licenses to international and local licensees.
