Europe doesn't have an ideas problem. It has a route-to-market problem.

Introducing Innovate's Business Coach division: coaching, representation and a contact book, across the UK, Europe and the US

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Something quietly significant happened in Westminster last month. In the reshuffle that followed Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister, the standalone science department was abolished. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology was folded into the Department for Business and Trade, and the two became a single new department: the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, or DBIST.

Intellectual property went with it. In August the IP brief was confirmed as sitting with Chris McDonald MP, DBIST's Minister for Science, Innovation and Investment, whose portfolio also covers research and development, technology transfer, scale-ups and access to finance. The Intellectual Property Office now reports to the same minister as Innovate UK and the Government Office for Technology Transfer.

Read that as a policy signal and it says something blunt: protecting an idea and commercialising it are the same job, and government has stopped pretending otherwise.

Brussels reached the same conclusion first. The European Innovation Act, due this year as the centrepiece of the EU's Startup and Scaleup Strategy, exists almost entirely to attack the commercialisation gap: getting research results to market, connecting inventors to industry, opening up procurement to small innovative companies. The European Economic and Social Committee has been describing the problem as a scaling gap rather than an ideas gap. The Commission's own figure is the one that should stop any inventor in their tracks: of the patents filed at the European Patent Office by universities, only around a third are ever commercially exploited.

And there is no shortage of ideas. The EPO received a record 201,974 patent applications in 2025. Of the applications originating in Europe, 26% came from individual inventors and small businesses, rising to roughly a third once universities and research organisations are included.

So Europe is inventing at record levels. Most of those inventions never reach a shelf, a catalogue, or a licence agreement.

That gap is exactly where we have spent the last two decades, and it is why we have built something new around it.

The new division

We have formed a dedicated Business Coach division to take inventors and early-stage companies from a protected concept to a commercial conversation with a real manufacturer or brand.

It runs across two territories:

  • Jean-Philippe Chameaux leads the Business Coach team across Europe, working from our French operation and covering French, Benelux and wider European industry.
  • Grace Doughty leads the Business Coach team from our UK office, working alongside our US office to open up North American manufacturers and brands as well as UK ones.

Between them they cover the markets our clients ask about first, in the languages and business cultures those markets actually respond to.

What makes this different: we don't stop at the research

Plenty of firms will sell an inventor a market research report. It arrives as a PDF, it lists some companies who might be interested, and then the inventor is on their own: cold emailing switchboards, being routed to a generic contact form, and waiting.

We do the research. Then we do the part that actually matters.

  1. We coach the concept into a proposition. Companies do not licence ideas. They licence propositions: a clear commercial case, defensible IP, a manufacturable design, credible costings, and an understanding of where the product sits against what the buyer already sells. Our business coaches work with inventors to build that, drawing on the design, prototyping and manufacturing teams already in-house.
  2. We represent the inventor in front of the companies. This is the core of it. We make the approach on the inventor's behalf. We put the proposition in front of the right person rather than the front desk. We sit in the meeting, translate between an inventor's enthusiasm and a corporate buyer's evaluation process, and stay alongside them through the discussion. An inventor approaching a multinational alone is an unknown quantity. An inventor arriving with an established design consultancy behind them is a proposition.
  3. We open a contact book that took twenty five years to build. We hold hundreds of live contacts across manufacturing, retail, consumer goods, medical, industrial and licensing. Named people, in named businesses, many of whom have looked at inventor propositions from us before and know what to expect when we call. That is not a database anyone can buy. It is the reason a conversation happens in weeks rather than never.

Who it's for

Inventors holding a granted or pending patent who have no idea who to call next. Start-ups with a working prototype and no commercial pipeline. Businesses with an internal innovation they have never taken beyond their own market. If you have an idea and no route, this division exists for you.

Both Westminster and Brussels have now concluded that Europe's weakness is not invention but commercialisation. We would put it more simply: the hard part was never having the idea. It was getting someone with a factory to take your call.

That is the part we do.

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