Problem:

  • A large, global skin care and cosmetics company looking for “out-of-the-box” ideas to seed its innovation efforts.
  • Previous engagements with OI services providers had resulted in a handful of interesting technologies, but the client felt that most were “variations on the same themes.” They wanted to bring new-to-the-industry products and services to market.
  • The client was not interested in any products or technologies specifically targeted to the skin care and cosmetics industry.
  • The product/technology value proposition needed to clearly demonstrate superiority to in-kind solutions.

yet2 Strategy and Role:

  • Ran an internal contest to identify our “favorite, most interesting or most compelling technologies” from roughly 400 well-vetted DealFlow Opportunities (DFOs) in our Strategic DealFlow database.
  • Consideration was NOT given to relevance for skin care/cosmetics or stage of development.

Results:

  • Over the following three-months, 27 DFOs were presented to the client, representing a very diverse set of technologies across a very broad range of industries and geographies.
  • Of those, seven were identified as interesting and four as “extremely interesting.”
  • The four DFOs were in the areas of
    • gamification
    • conductive (nano) particles
    • a water purification method without chemicals, electricity, or pressure,
    • an ultra-low power system on a chip

Conclusion:

  • Now in early collaboration discussions with 4 companies.