Partners · Industry
Bring us a problem with a number attached.
Real innovation has to be anchored in business problems with a specific, verifiable minimum economic threshold. If a problem doesn’t have one, it isn’t ready for research — it’s ready for a conversation.
Four ways to work with us
The problem bank
Vetted sector pain points contributed by enterprises and government departments, governed by members rather than collected through a generic innovation call.
R&D as a service
Contracted research against a defined problem, executed by a pod with a named lead, on a published milestone schedule.
Pilot consortiums
Founders, enterprises and labs matched around a shared problem using shared compute — so no single party carries the whole cost or risk.
Sponsored research and patronage
Fund a track, own a defined slice of the resulting IP, and take an exclusive licence where that is the right structure.
IP, stated up front
Recommended structure
The FRO owns the patent. You take the exclusive licence.
For sponsored research there are three possible outcomes — the sponsor owns the patent, the FRO owns it and the sponsor takes an exclusive licence, or joint ownership. We recommend the second, and we say so before negotiations rather than during them.
Joint ownership sounds fairer and creates coordination problems on every subsequent licensing decision. We will do it, but only where governance is mature enough to carry it.
Every filing, ownership decision and licensing proposal goes through an Intellectual Property Council drawn from research, legal, industry and finance. The full framework →
What gets built
Discovered bottom-up
A catalogue of high-revenue use cases and high-stakes problem statements, gathered from operators rather than assumed.
Researched systematically
Anchored to a verifiable economic threshold, so the output has somewhere to land.
Solved and exported
Less-solved problems solved cheaper, better and faster — then taken to the world, not only deployed at home.