Living Lab: Strengthening the Tech Partner Pipeline

WHIN’s Living Lab is unique in providing a base of customers and a model for accelerating the use of IoT that, in the case of agriculture, is field-ready or nearly so. The challenge is to be efficient in finding state-of-the-art technology for the region that also needs the Living Lab. WHIN’s sweet spot is a relatively narrow stage in commercialization where products are basically ready for market but still need market validation before they can be launched.

A very efficient source of leads for field-ready IoT is the venture capital firms that are investing in promising technologies, as well as large corporations that are looking for emerging technologies to integrate into their core product offerings.

As word about the WHIN Living Lab is spreading nationally and even internationally, WHIN has begun developing relationships with the investor community and large corporations, and has uncovered an appetite for the services the WHIN Living Lab can meet. And those services are not available elsewhere.

Even better, what investors and corporate partners need is what WHIN is already doing in its vetting processes as it assesses companies and products for their readiness to serve the region, and existing tech partners for whether they are living up to their potential. The data WHIN develops for itself can easily be packaged to provide highly useful information to investors and corporate partners.

WHIN has connected those dots, forming a Consortium of investors and corporate partners who receive quarterly reports of products and technologies that WHIN is vetting as well in depth analyses of companies whose products are in use in the Living Lab.

Essentially, the Consortium model outsources some of the search for technology. WHIN expects the service to result in investors and corporate partners sending their companies to the Living Lab as they gain confidence in WHIN’s process.

A big bonus is that Consortium services are an additional value proposition for tech companies themselves, especially if they are high-growth startups seeking investment for their next step or for acquisition. Being part of the Living Lab is becoming very valuable to the innovation economy.?Learn more: whin.org/consortium