How Realco uses innovation scouting to monitor their market

Discover how Realco overcomes their challenges with Novable’s innovation scouting services

Realco for corporate innovation

Laurent Delhalle is an experienced scientist with over fifteen years of academic experience and currently Realco’s Senior Research Scientist. In this interview, he tells our Novable Agents about Realco and their need to continuously monitor their market with the use of innovation scouting.

Q: What is Realco doing?

A: Realco is a company founded in 1968 and operates in the biotechnology sector. Realco offers hygiene solutions to both professionals and consumers. It enables the food and beverage industry to ensure food quality and safety, and extend the shelf-life of produce. In this way, the institutional and private catering sectors decrease the risk of food contamination and ensure employees’​ safety. Realco also helps hospitals to reduce the risk of hospital-acquired infections and helps consumers to favor thorough daily cleaning vs. disinfection.

Q: What was Realco’s challenge and how did you try to address it by yourself?

A: At Realco, our objective is to know where we, and our technology, stand within the market. We need to map the current technology landscape of the biofilm-fighting market. Until now, we were spending many hours searching Google – with lots of dead-ends. Our industry involves very specific technologies, and a Google search is not enough. We needed a solution that would speed this process up and would help us reach the ultimate decision much faster.

Startup Scouting for Corporate Innovation with Novable

Q: How was Novable involved in that process?

A: We now use Novable to map out the current technology landscape in the biofilm-fighting area – it already solved one of our problems. We started this by running a campaign to identify companies active in the biofilm sector, and especially those who already have developed and commercialised biofilm detection solutions. With this information, Realco gets insight into new trends, anticipates future product releases and defines how to deal with competition. Novable makes us spare half of the time we were spending before, and we get notified as soon as any update or news occurs within our market’s environment.

A: We now use Novable to map out the current technology landscape in the biofilm-fighting area – it already solved one of our problems. We started this by running a campaign to identify companies active in the biofilm sector, and especially those who already have developed and commercialised biofilm detection solutions. With this information, Realco gets insight into new trends, anticipates future product releases and defines how to deal with competition. Novable makes us spare half of the time we were spending before, and we get notified as soon as any update or news occurs within our market’s environment.

Q: How does this specifically benefit Realco?

A: Having a real-time view of the industry players gives Realco’s R&D department an edge to better analyse the market. This enables us to develop truly disruptive products without fear of direct competition, and to understand differences and similarities with other products. Realco can therefore offer a better, more efficient alternative.

Read Novable Client Stories

We find many use cases with Novable: monitor a specific topic, anticipate competition trends, set up an innovation culture, find specific solutions are some of them. Spending so many hours on the Web or in databases is not efficient nor ideal, as we are flooded with many different (and not always good) possibilities that don’t meet your company’s strategic innovation objectives. We call it the SAD Syndrome, which stands for Spot, Analyse, Drop – and Repeat. As our interviewee mentioned, why spend so many resources, energy and time doing such tedious tasks while you can easily delegate them to the Novable machine?

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