Make Every R&D Dollar Build Better, More Profitable Products.
TurningScience helps you put every R&D dollar behind the research partnerships your product roadmap needs—so you can build future products, enter new markets, protect your competitive edge, and improve margins without building every R&D capability in-house.
Where R&D Investment Starts Losing Product Value
Too many R&D options. No clear way to triage them.
Projects, proposals, technologies, and potential partners compete for the same budget. The most valuable opportunities do not always receive the most support.
Your roadmap requires capabilities you do not have in-house.
A product, performance, or margin priority depends on specialist expertise, equipment, facilities, or capacity your current team cannot provide.
Future-product work keeps losing to current product demands.
Your team stays focused on today’s customers while the research behind tomorrow’s products keeps getting delayed.
Competitors are building capabilities faster.
While you decide where to invest, another company may already be funding the research and partnerships your future products will require.
Product margins keep getting squeezed.
Cost, yield, reliability, performance, and manufacturing problems remain unresolved because the required expertise sits out of reach.
Previous partnerships created more work than value.
Projects stalled, lost focus, produced results your team could not use, or required more management than expected.
Market demands change faster than your R&D capacity.
New customer requirements can appear before you have the people, expertise, or facilities required to respond.
One wrong partner can cost you 6–12 months.
A poor fit can consume your team’s time, energy, and budget without producing a better product or a useful next decision.
Your Product Roadmap Shouldn’t Stop at Your Network
TurningScience gives you access to David’s global research network—built through work trusted by 80+ organizations across four continents and more than 200 workshops across 60+ institutions. That reach helps you look beyond familiar institutions and obvious names to find research partners with the expertise, facilities, capacity, and industry fit your product roadmap requires. The capability you need may already exist. The advantage goes to the company that can find it, engage it, and put it to work first.
More Efficient R&D. More Agile Partners. More Profitable Products.
Better research partnerships help you direct limited R&D resources toward the product opportunities with the strongest market demand and profit potential.
Build better partnerships around your product roadmap
Give your most important roadmap priorities the external expertise, facilities, and research capacity they require.
Maintain your competitive advantage
Develop important capabilities before competitors make them standard—or customers begin expecting them.
Build products for tomorrow’s customers
Prepare for the performance, technology, and capabilities your next generation of products will need.
Enter new markets
Test whether your technology can support new applications, customer groups, and product categories.
Support future business development
Give your business-development team stronger technology, evidence, and capabilities to take into new customer conversations.
Improve margins
Address the cost, yield, reliability, manufacturability, performance, and product-value problems affecting profitability.
Focus your R&D spending
Put more funding behind the projects most likely to improve products, protect margins, or open future revenue opportunities.
Respond faster when markets change
Access new capabilities and start new R&D work without waiting to hire a permanent team or build an expensive facility.
How TurningScience Builds Stronger R&D Partnerships
Start with your product roadmap
Define the product, market, customer, competitive, or margin priority the partnership must support.
Triage your opportunities
Compare current projects, proposals, technical options, and capability gaps against their potential business value.
Choose the right technical direction
Determine which path deserves investment and what must be proved before you commit more time and budget.
Select the right research partner
Assess potential teams for expertise, facilities, capacity, timing, responsiveness, flexibility, and fit with your company.
Build the partnership around your product roadmap
Align the objectives, responsibilities, milestones, evidence requirements, knowledge transfer, and next investment decision.
Maintain the partnerships behind your best technology platforms
Deepen the relationships that continue to advance valuable technology platforms. Redirect or stop work that no longer supports your roadmap.
More Product Capability. Less Permanent Overhead.
Your strongest partnerships stay focused on your highest-value development priorities
Missing expertise and facilities can be tested before you commit to hiring or building them
New R&D work can begin faster when customers and markets change
Your future-development pipeline becomes less dependent on internal headcount
Leadership gains a clearer basis for deciding where the next R&D dollar should go
External research expands your capacity instead of becoming another burden for your team
Ways to Work With Us
Product & Technology
Opportunity Review
You have current projects, new proposals, capability gaps, or future-product priorities competing for limited R&D resources. The Review identifies which opportunities deserve more support, which need a different direction, and which are consuming budget without enough product value.
What’s included
Review of your highest-priority product and technology needs
Comparison of current projects, proposals, and capability gaps
Identification of work that is duplicated, premature, or disconnected from the roadmap
Prioritization based on product value, market opportunity, competitive advantage, and margin potential
Clear recommendations to expand, reshape, investigate, pause, or stop
Executive readout explaining each recommendation and the decision that should follow
R&D Strategy Sprint
You know which product, market, performance, or margin priority matters but the technical direction is unclear. The Sprint helps you choose the technical direction worth pursuing before committing to a research partner or major R&D investment.
What’s included
The product or market result the technical direction must support
A focused shortlist of technical routes worth investigating
Comparison based on product value, maturity, timing, cost, risk, and resource needs—with weak routes removed early
Evaluation of which problems belong with an external research partner versus your internal team
Review of your organization’s readiness for a productive research partnership
The evidence and decision criteria required before making a larger investment
A recommended technical direction, partner criteria, and next investment decision
Innovation Partnership Launch
The technical direction is clear to you. Now you need the right research partner, the right working relationship, and a first project built around the result your company needs.
What’s included
Partner requirements built around your product, market, performance, or margin priority
Identification of suitable teams across universities, institutes, laboratories, and specialist facilities
A documented shortlist and preferred-partner recommendation
Assessment of expertise, facilities, capacity, timing, responsiveness, and working fit
A first-project scope covering responsibilities, milestones, required evidence, and knowledge transfer
Partnership governance, working cadence, and launch plan
TurningScience’s participation in kickoff to align both teams on priorities, roles, and immediate next steps
Why TurningScience?
Your roadmap comes first.
Every partner is assessed against a specific product, market, performance, competitive, or margin priority.
You get a decision your company can act on.
Every engagement ends with a clear recommendation and next investment decision.
Partner fit includes more than technical expertise.
Capacity, facilities, timing, responsiveness, flexibility, and working style are assessed alongside technical strength.
You can search beyond the usual names.
TurningScience compares research teams across institutions, partner types, geographies, and David’s existing network.
You benefit from 30+ years on both sides.
David understands how companies invest in R&D, how research teams work, and what each side needs from the partnership.
Your partnership is built to keep producing value.
Clear roles, milestones, knowledge transfer, working rhythms, and decision points are established before the project begins.
Frequently Asked Questions
We already have research partners. Can TurningScience still help?
Yes. Existing partnerships still need to earn their place on your product roadmap. TurningScience helps you decide which relationships deserve more support, which projects need a different direction, and which work should pause or stop.
Why does every engagement start with the Opportunity Review?
The Review prevents your company from committing to the wrong technical path, partner search, or larger engagement. It determines whether you need to refocus existing work, investigate possible directions, launch a partnership, or avoid further investment.
Do we need to complete all three offers?
No. Every engagement begins with the Opportunity Review. You then move into the Strategy Sprint, the Partnership Launch, or no further work based on what the Review finds.
Can our internal team or AI find the right research partner?
Your team and AI tools can find papers, institutions, and researchers. TurningScience adds global reach, cross-institution comparison, and an assessment of facilities, capacity, timing, responsiveness, flexibility, and industry fit.
What if a previous research partnership stalled or failed?
TurningScience has studied successful and failed research partnerships and identified the most common causes of failure. We examine where yours broke down—priority, partner selection, scope, ownership, communication, governance, or knowledge transfer—then apply those lessons to reduce the risk of repeating it.
How involved is TurningScience once a partner is selected?
TurningScience helps align the first project, working relationship, responsibilities, milestones, knowledge transfer, and decision points. David also participates in kickoff so both teams begin with the same priorities and expectations. Any continuing support beyond the Launch is scoped separately when the partnership requires it.
Will the project succeed?
No project can be guaranteed. This is not “we’ll see” research. TurningScience only moves forward when we believe the project can deliver a valuable result. We screen partners for the commitment industry work requires and structure targeted feasibility studies around clear milestones, decision metrics, and progress tracking. Every engagement is built to produce useful evidence, clear learning, and a better next decision.