Who can we partner with to develop our business as a specialist materials provider?

We helped our client to form partnerships with companies that share technical synergies – a step they had been unable to take on their own – resulting in them moving to take advantage of several potential commercial opportunities.

Our client asked:

Our venture capital client’s portfolio company is a specialist materials provider to the micro electromechanical systems and thin film market that has made some progress in commercialising the technology, with revenue streams in the high-end ink-jet printer head and high performance speaker markets.

Their company had other potential applications for its technology but no current partners to develop these products. The client was interested in understanding which companies have technical synergies that they could advance in technical partnership and also potential to progress.

The project story:

We held an initial workshop with the client to better understand the portfolio company’s capabilities. We then looked at the types of companies in the thinfilm piezo industry and further investigated companies across three types of companies: equipment, foundry and integrated device manufacture.

We selected 12 companies for deep dive and interviewed their senior stakeholders – including CEO, VPs and CTOs – to better understand the possibility of technical synergies between these companies and our client.

Results: deliverables and outcomes

Our work enabled our client to move forward with several potential opportunities by quickly gaining access to the companies we identified and interviewed, which they had been unable to do by themselves. We achieved this by introducing our client to senior stakeholders from the interviewed companies for further discussions related to potential technical partnerships.