1. Please give us some information about your organization
PosterLab was founded in 2021 by Santi Porta and Sébastien Charles. Our aim is to make partnerships in R&D succeed, especially for chemical and life science corporate organizations. We provide self-explanatory guidance and health dashboards to partnering teams and their management. We are based in Germany (Frankfurt area) and currently employ 11 persons (6 nationalities, 3 continents). We have a strong and international PosterLab Scientific Committee (14 members) to support us, ensuring our solution fits market needs. On top of it, we are building an ecosystem of partners, like with iED, that provide highly qualitative services to our audience of alliance managers, for example, match-making to apply for EU funds.
2. What inspired you to create your organization?
Our CEO, Sébastien Charles, worked for many years as an Innovation Manager for different global companies (US, Germany). During his career, he experienced a lot of unclarity and missed potential during collaborative innovation projects. The signal was clear, companies and institutions know much more than they think they know. Joining forces, skills, and knowledge in a more systematic way offers a lot of opportunities for growth and innovation for corporations partnering together.
In today's world, "partnership in R&D is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to defend a company's competitive advantage," as per a Global Alliance manager we interviewed. Our multi-partner collaboration platform addresses both the needs of senior Alliance & Innovation Managers and the partnering teams thanks to the built-in agile process and dashboards. Alliance & Innovation managers can steer their partnerships in line with their roadmap. R&D Partnering teams are given a safe place to communicate, track milestones, transfer knowledge and monitor the health of their partnerships, thanks to built-in guardrails that increase the odds for partnerships to succeed.
3. What is your field of expertise?
Our team has people with strong academic and practical backgrounds in IT, Design, and business thinking. Additionally, we conducted over 100 "voice of the market" with recognized Senior Alliance Managers, Innovation and digital transformation professionals, TTOs, and researchers to investigate the current situation, challenges, and needs when it comes to partnership in R&D . This gives us both, an understanding of the demands, and the skills to build a strong and helpful tool for innovation leaders.
4. What is your organization's impact on society?
Our vision is: Knowledge cannot be wasted. The world is facing several challenges that need to be tackled fast.
During our research, we found out that a large number of R&D partnerships (50-70%) fail or do not reach their goals. Especially due to the rising number of partnerships established in the last couple of years (+15% year on year) and the growing complexity to bring innovation to the market, a partnership's failure can cause a huge loss of resources and wasted growth potential.
We are creating a digital platform that builds bridges between partners to establish living, productive, and well manageable partnerships. We help organizations and dedicated Alliance Managers to set up the right processes and keep a convenient overview of all ongoing processes. The neutral workplace we provide for multi-institutional project teams gives the opportunity to share early research findings, documents and find the right expert based on a centrally updated skill and knowledge database. Due to the fact that time is scarce, we want researchers to spend as much time as possible on doing research and not fighting against non-transparent databases.
Our platform increases the odds for faster and more successful innovation through better partnerships.
5. What is something your organization achieved that you are proud of?
In the last year, our start-up made a lot of progress! We built up a very young and multinational team while compiling many different disciplines and creative ideas. As a very promising team, we raised the needed financial resources for implementing our idea of an innovative multi-partner collaboration platform. During our ongoing conceptualization and implementation phase, we had a lot of interesting discussions and presentations with several important institutions, both from the academic and corporative sides.
We are very proud to count BASF and ZEISS among our customers and the EU-funded consortia FORTHEM.
Learn more about PosterLab by visiting their official website or LinkedIn page.
Request a demo and contact: https://calendly.com/sebastien-posterlab/30min
