Our staff are motivated by seeing the positive impact of their hard work in practice: supporting improved farming systems; delivering improved environmental outcomes; and creating new platform-level technologies applicable to solving important challenges faced by multiple industries.
To be sustainable over the long term, innovations must be economically viable. That requires getting products and services into enough paying customers’ hands to recover the cost of investment, ongoing maintenance and improvements throughout the life cycle.
At Lincoln Agritech we are agnostic about the model for commercialisation, selecting on a case-by-case basis the model with potential to deliver the most impact for New Zealand and alignment with our values.
As a KiwiNet-eligible research entity we are able to leverage 50% government grant co-funding to help our publicly funded research outputs progress from proof of concept to investor-readiness. From there, projects may become new start-up companies, or the intellectual property may be licensed out to a market-facing company best placed to find early-adopter customers and execute growth strategies.
On other occasions we undertake simple fee-for-service research and development services for existing companies in market – delivering proof of concepts they package into market-ready solutions to add to their existing portfolios. Under this model, the company typically owns any intellectual property rights resulting from the project for their application.
A third approach we take is identifying overseas technologies and products that, with some adaptation, could be applied to New Zealand use cases. We then build collaborations with industry to spread the cost and benefits of adaptation and validation across multiple industry users.
Bluelab
