Our Approach
Developing a contract R&D relationship is an exercise in building trust. For a client for whom payback periods on any R&D activity may be measured in years, the difficulty is often to assess which provider is best placed to deliver the necessary innovation and technical skills. When management time has been invested in selecting the best provider, the client often finds that it is more economic to use that provider for many other projects, rather than go through a full selection process again.
For Sentec, the challenge is to develop relationships that allow us to actually add value to a client's inhouse R&D team. Such relationships are of course, individual to each client, but there are some common characteristics for all of our most successful relationships:
Transparency.
Aiming for a clear understanding of each other's commercial agendas from the startRisk appreciation.
When both sides agree on the risks of the project then they can be allocated to the side best placed to deal with them. For example, Sentec typically operates fixed price projects for fixed technical deliverables, on the principle that it is best placed to reduce the technical riskFlexibility.
Not letting process get in the way of structuring a helpful relationship
Building partnerships in product development
