Seeport

Seeport™ SBIR - Commercialization Assistance Process

Welcome to our program. The agency funding your SBIR or STTR has hired us, under a separate contract, to support commercialization of your technology. The precise content of our work, and the flexibility we have, is defined by our contract with the agency. The specific options for each agency can be found by clicking on the appropriate tab above.

Usually projects take between four and eight weeks to complete. If you have special time constraints or considerations, please let us know as soon as possible and we will do our best to accommodate. To report time concerns, call our scheduling office at 401.273.4844, ext. 15.

Step One: Set-Up and Kick-Off
Step Two: Tasking Confirmation Email
Step Three: Call Between your Commercialization Team and our Market Research Analyst
Step Four: Interim Report
Step Five: Continuing Work
Step Six: Final Report
Step Seven: Quality Assurance Follow-up
Step Eight: Debrief
Listing your Technology on Seeport™ MarketPlace
Points of Contact

Step One: Set-Up and Kick-Off

All projects begin with either Foresight or the agency sending you a one page set-up form. The form collects basic information about the technology, who our point of contact is in your company, and what your goals are for our work. This set-up form is emailed to us at setup@foresightst.com.

Once the form is received, we will send you an acknowledgement. If you do not get one within two business days, please call us at 401.273.4844, ext. 15 in case there is an email problem at one side or the other.

The receipt of the set-up triggers several activities at Foresight. The most important one for you is that your project is logged in and a kick-off call with a Foresight Team Leader will be scheduled to ensure you get service that creates value for you. The purpose of the call is to define the tasking for your project and to ensure the managers for our work, in your company and in ours, are in agreement over that tasking. During this conversation, we will review the data you submitted in your set-up form, answer any questions about Foresight’s methodology, and ask you to select a single application for the technology, which enables us to direct our research and deliver maximum value on the limited budget the agency provides us for our work. We will be happy to explore different options and applications with you and make suggestions; however, the decision is yours, as you will be responsible for moving the technology to market after our work is complete.

This discussion takes approximately 15 minutes and does not require the presence of your technical staff, only the corporate official in charge of your SBIR or STTR work.

If you have any special requests or specific objectives you would like our service to meet, please raise these during this call. Also at this time, if our standard Non-Disclosure Agreement does not work for you, please let us know and arrange to send us yours, modified to meet the requirements found on this website under the documents tab for your specific agency.

During our market research, we will call experts and potential end-users of the technology, and, if you desire and are prepared for us to do so, targets, who are potential Phase III partners, which we call targets. Please be prepared to discuss who you think might be good resources for us to contact during this call. (If you are not ready for us to approach targets, we will spend that time in other ways we can discuss.)

If you do wish for us to contact potential targets, and do not have marketing materials prepared for our analysts to use (such as a white paper or technology fact sheet), please let us know at this time. We can assist you in preparing these documents. Please also be aware that by asking us to contact targets, we assume you will follow up with these targets after our initial conversation.

Step Two: Tasking Confirmation

Email

After the call, an email will be sent asking you to confirm the conversation, the application, and the scope of work. Please reply back with confirmation, changes, and/or any questions. The Team Leader who conducts the call will be your point of contact at Foresight until a market research analyst or deal-maker is assigned. If you have additional materials or information that was not included on the set-up form, this is a good time to send the information to Foresight.

Step Three: Call Between your Commercialization Team and our Market Research Analyst

Once confirmation is received, Foresight will assign a qualifed analyst to your project and schedule a start date. Our analysts have been through Foresight's internal training program for commercialization, technology transfer, and transitioning market research and deal-making and have earned the classification of Foresight Principal Investigator (PI). Only certified PI's are allowed to be a lead on your project, although some PIs may be working with trainee assistants. You will be informed of the PI and project start date. We will contact you to set up a conversation with the PI to discuss your technology in more depth.

It is important to have technical people in this call who can explain just what makes your technology unique and exciting. We also welcome any other participants you may want on this call.

This call tends to be longer than the first call as it focused on the technology itself. If you have specific requests about who we should or should not contact during our work, please make them during this call. If your company has a Business Development or Marketing department or specialist, it is important to have them in on this call.

If you have any concerns about our talking with experts, end-users, targets, or other stakeholders, please let your PI know. Although we do ask about such restrictions in the set-up form, you can always add additional restrictions. Please document restrictions in an email after providing them over the phone.

Step Four: Interim Report

Our work is usually completed in two stages. For most projects, after initial work, we will send you an interim report. This report could come as early as a day or two into the project, as sometimes all the data you need for that interim report seems to just fall into your lap.

The function of the interim report is to keep you abreast of our work and to provide information that will enable you to be an active participant in our activities should you wish. We ask you to review the work and send us any suggestions or comments within one day if possible as our PIs are on schedules and have to maintain progress even if you do not respond in a timely manner. We will do our best, of course, to ensure all your concerns and comments are addressed in the final report.

Always remember, our work is designed to help you, so you are a vital member of our Quality Assurance team.

Step Five: Continuing Work

We will continue to work quickly and aggressively on your behalf. As before, our PI will likely be in contact with you by phone or email, whichever you prefer, for questions and clarifications.

On most projects, our PI will offer to cold call potential Phase III partners so long as you have marketing material available and agree to promtly follow-up after we open the door for a discussion. If you have any concerns about talking with the target, let us know as we can provide training and/or set up a conference call in which we will participate as facilitators. We also are glad to provide advice on how to put together marketing fact sheets or quad charts as well as other marketing material.

You should budget up to eight hours for participation in phone calls or emails with Foresight or potential Phase III partners and other stakeholders (potential lead customers, trade press editors, etc.) interested in discussing your technology with you.

Step Six: Final Report

The final report summarizes all our work on your behalf. Prior to being shipped to you, it is reviewed by a technical editor and by a senior commercialization mentor on our staff. We welcome any feedback or comments you may have and are glad to accommodate all reasonable revisions. As the customer, you are the most important person on our QA team.

Step Seven: Quality Assurance Follow-up

At Foresight good enough is not good enough. We constantly strive to be better. Our Quality Assurance staff will contact you shortly after we email the draft final report to you to ensure you have received the final report, to evaluate our performance, and to ask for your thoughts on how we might improve the value of our work. This process involves a quick survey sent via email.

Step Eight: Debrief

Each project ends with a telephone or, if you wish to travel to us, in-person debrief between your company, our PI, and one of our senior commercialization mentors. The function of this debrief is to answer any questions you may have about the data, analysis, or recommendations we are providing and to discuss what the implications of our work might be for your commercialization efforts.

During this time we are glad to discuss anything of interest to you. We allot one half hour for the discussion, but will go longer if it is helpful to you.

At the end of the debrief, our work under agency funding is officially over. We are, of course, glad to respond to quick emails or engage in brief telephone discussions as you move downstream at no cost to you. After all, our mutual goal is to see you successfully commercialize and we recognize questions may emerge downstream that relate to the work we have done. We also will continue to pass along any contacts from potential Phase III partners or stakeholders that may occur because of activities during the course of our agency-funded work.

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Listing your Technology on Seeport™ MarketPlace

Foresight provides a free listing on our Seeport™ MarketPlace, where you can list your SBIR or STTR funded technology at no cost for up to one year after the completion of our work. In addition, your access to the SBIR website provides you a wealth of training and other help.

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Points of Contact at Foresight

Kim McGrath, is our SBIR CAP Administrator. She is reached at 401.273.4844, ex. 15.
Our Services Team Leader is John Reimers. His team of analysts will conduct your project. He is reached at 401.273.4844, ext 23.

Email for the SBIR team may be sent to sbir@foresightst.com