Proposals to develop technologies; mobile applications, products, software and similar tools are always sought after by many developers as they present great opportunities for inventors and innovators to advance their works and also make a positive impact on the community.

The downside on all these good intentions by developers is that they often lack a fair understanding of the business aspects needed to bring their ideas to fruition and make the desired impact on their communities and businesses at large.

A few years back we participated in a tech development proposal where we were not successful but took a number of lessons that we want to share with you. It is therefore against this background that we share with you this checklist to help you prepare much better for you next proposal and definitely find an answer to #whereyourmoneyat.

• The proposal must contain clear and measurable objectives and sub-objectives.
• The proposed activities to be executed should largely contribute to a credible and realistic development of innovation to the level of market uptake and they must lead to optimal development of the innovation, so should a well-documented long-term impact of innovation be included.
• The proposal should contain sufficient evidence of the project’s game-changing innovations on the industry bases, this should be coupled with a sound business innovation concept with reasonable terms of the funding amount
• It is always important to test the innovation in an operational environment before bidding for funding to develop the final product. This will help you to demonstrate sufficiently that your innovation is significantly novel and higher than other current products on the market.
• You should also have a sound and solid commercialization plan for your innovation. It should include analytical simulations for market expectations and/or important values like breakeven point or expected EBIT.
• Your market overview must include; an overview of market barriers/obstacles, provide a strategy for overcoming barriers, provide sufficient data to show; targeted markets, potential sales and profits, the range of prices; language options; performance, etc. and lastly provide realistic and convincing financial calculations.
•  A good analysis of legal conditions, market size, and prospects for growth, analysis of existing and possible competitors must be presented with convincing details.
• You must provide a thorough competitor analysis containing concrete key competitors (direct/indirect competitors); and their competitive advantage; pricing; the dissemination and/or marketing strategies (B2B and/or B2C) and channels.
• Your innovation solution scalability on European and/or global level is must be supported with fundamental evidence on target consumers’ needs -the analysis of the needs of your target user market. etc. The proposal should also contain the analysis of user-specific needs.

If you took note, most aspects in the checklist are customer centered. This arises from the need for innovators to come up with new innovation ideas that are based on customer needs. To help you develop such customer based solutions, you could look out for tools like design thinking processes to help you customize your products according to your consumer needs. This will also help you to generate evidence that the solution of innovation activities can be translated into sales. With those few insights, we strongly believe that you will be able to produce a water tight proposal and find #whereyourmoneyat.

If you are interested in:

• Having #2 top Horizon 2020 performer in Central Europe in your consortium, contact r.miskuf@pedal-consulting.eu
• Accessing public tenders abroad, click here
• Winning public grants, click here
• Securing alternative forms of financing, click here
• Learn more about the topic, click here

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