Building an R&D pipeline without an R&D team

Situation

A mandate to create: bringing new products to market without an R&D team

Oldcastle Infrastructure is behind many of the engineering innovations that surround us every day. Part of CRH (LSE: CRH, ISE: CRG, NYSE: CRH), a Fortune 500 company with $31B in revenue in 2021, Oldcastle makes urban living safe and possible. Their portfolio includes dozens of products across communications, transportation, energy, buildings, and water.

Oldcastle engineers solutions for stormwater management, a global issue with a market size of over $13 billion. Their stormwater products are used by Quantico National Cemetery, Los Angeles International Airport, The Atlanta Braves’ and San Francisco 49ers’ stadiums, and many other buildings and municipalities.

Mark Sweeney, Product Manager at Oldcastle Infrastructure, had a mandate to bring new products to market. The challenge? He didn’t have any internal R&D resources.

We needed to have a pipeline to build out our product roadmap, but we didn’t have an internal engine to go build up those developments and innovations.

While Oldcastle is a leader in urban infrastructure solutions, the company does not have a centralized R&D team. Historically, R&D partnering was “catch as catch can.” Although Sweeney had previously engaged engineering and consulting firms, these collaborations were not achieving the results Oldcastle wanted. This approach was time-intensive and narrow in scope.

Seeking a systematic—rather than ad hoc—driver for the stormwater management product pipeline, Sweeney decided to join forces with Halo.

Halo’s platform simplifies tech scouting and partnering. In a matter of weeks, we received high-quality proposals that aligned with our interests. Halo’s experts also helped us evaluate proposals and narrow down final selections. Although our goal was to fund one project, we ended up funding three.

Action

Building an R&D engine

Stormwater management requires advanced technologies, and there’s demand for infrastructural solutions—according to a 2016 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report, U.S. states needed $19B in funding to address stormwater.

Oldcastle understood that a product that filters nitrogen out of stormwater before it enters lakes, rivers, and the ocean would reduce harm to the environment and add a valuable new capability to Oldcastle’s portfolio.

Halo had the network, expertise, and tools to make this a reality.

Expanding Oldcastle’s reach

Without a formal R&D partnering function or internal R&D team, Oldcastle did not have a systemic way to find prospective collaborators, track their discoveries, and stay in touch for future research. Sweeney had identified at most five researchers through his network who he had confidence could solve this challenge.

With Halo, Oldcastle quickly connected with 3,200 credentialed Ph.Ds and hundreds of startups. The company ultimately received more than 60 proposals for a single RFP within eight weeks—far more than they would have reached manually.

Halo is a great way to connect industry with researchers that we otherwise would have a hard time reaching. The platform was easy to use and very much lived up to the promise of expanded reach to these experts. It was really validating to find all these scientists interested in what we're doing. We just didn't know there were so many out there.

Saving valuable resources

Although tasked with bringing new products to market, Sweeney’s team has a full slate of other responsibilities for Oldcastle’s stormwater portfolio. Reaching out to potential collaborators one-to-one would have taken a tremendous amount of time—which Sweeney and his team did not have, given their other duties. Oldcastle needed a solution that would be fast and turnkey.

Halo supplemented Oldcastle’s capacity, allowing them to pinpoint experts and begin generating new product solutions without burdening Sweeney’s team.

Without Halo, we would’ve approached researchers on a one-off basis. It would have been impossible for us to reach so many people on our own. There isn’t any amount of time or money we could have spent that would've enabled us to reach everybody who saw our RFP and submitted proposals.

Results

R&D pipeline without overhead

From the 60 strong responses to their RFP, Oldcastle selected three collaborators, exceeding their initial goal by one project. They were able to accommodate three projects—rather than two—without increasing their total budget:

• Duke University: A larger, 9-month project focused on unique materials that could be tuned to filter pollutants;
• University of South Florida: A project aiming to integrate a well-known technology—biochar—into an existing Oldcastle product;
• University of Minnesota: A small proof-of-concept study for a new, early-stage technology.

As Oldcastle discovered, Halo can jumpstart—in just a few weeks—a practice for enterprises without established R&D teams that would typically take years.

The alternative to Halo would be to hire a PhD to found and lead an R&D team. Now, compare that cost to what you can get much faster from Halo without the overhead of a team. Working with Halo was a no-brainer.