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INNOVATION ASSESSMENT

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High Level Technical Support
for the
Private Equity Investor

An Essential Perspective

While conventional wisdom is to invest only in businesses that one properly understands, innovating a brand-new technical product can push at the boundaries of any investor’s comfort zone. Market-based investment appraisals may appear to focus on financial measures and techniques. Engineering and technology have an essential place in assessment processes applying to manufactured products.

A genuinely new idea has no market history. While its value as an intellectual property will/should have been protected, there might be no fully-developed prototype that can be benchmarked. With nothing to go on except what it might be supposed to share with products appearing to have something in common, is the proposal sound enough to back at this stage? Market-based innovation assessment will look carefully at how a product satisfies perceived needs, and its effectiveness as a vehicle for wealth generation; but: Will it work? Will it be reliable? Will it be safe? Can it be made? are issues not formally addressed by patent applications.

Our Services

We provide evaluation services advising on the technical and engineering integrity of new product or process proposals within our declared competencies. These include all aspects of thermal, environmental and fluid handling products and process equipment.
We establish a firm duty-of-care support base for investors and advisors contemplating funding of product-centred SME start-ups. This time-saving facility analyses the design and production integrity of investment opportunities under consideration.

Our Credentials

Our involvement with bringing engineering designs to market dates from the Design Advisory Service and PERA - the Production Engineering Research Association - in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Malcolm Robins, Dove Thermal’s founder-director, received the Design Council’s Award for “Consistent High Standards of Project Management & Design Capability”. He served as adjudicator for the British Engineering Design Awards, the Industrial Development Board for Northern Ireland, and NatWest-BP Awards for Technology. Several of the products and innovators benefitting from these start-up sponsorships are now global names.

Robins is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer, Member of the Institution of Engineering Designers, and of the Heat Transfer Society; also, a late Fellow of the IPlantE and Society of Operations Engineers. He mentors first-degree engineering students and helps promote innovative thinking and know-how among aspiring young entrepreneurs and technologists.