When you are collaborating with your innovation partner, you are a super collaborator, you know what you want to do, but also you have to know how much cost to make it together. Or maybe you are an innovation manager and you have to pilot a new concept and you need to create the budget for this prototype.
If you are in a collaboration, you have to discuss this budget together, and make the calculations together. You have to talk about money very clearly and the earlier the best, because you save time, and you avoid misunderstandings. For instance, inside the Collabwith Platform, when you are creating your profile, you have to add your “ratio per hour”, and this “action” has the objective to speed up the collaboration process, to speed up the decision making and avoid tons of meetings from both sides. It’s a way that a tool will help you to negotiate and talk about money for a collaboration and for innovation.
Calculator for evidences:
- Material costs per project: Physical materials needed or other materials needed.
- Production costs per project: Production costs could be UX design, graphic design, industrial design, software development, manufacturing, etc.
- Time to research or prototype: Add your own and team hours, salary in hours and prototype hours.
- Overheads: +20% These overheads will vary from university to university or company to company.
- Extra error & risk buffer: +20%.
- Extra costs: Online subscriptions, logistics, books, papers, travels, public transport, computers, other hardware or material needed to perform the project.
Then, you have to do a sum of these costs, and this is the first draft for your budget of your innovation project.
Collaboration Steps when talking about budget:
- First, you do your own calculation.
- Second, you show your calculation to your collaboration partner, and you ask that they have to calculate their budget as well with the same format. Hence, you have a visibility of costs from both sides.
- In case of doing a business collaboration for innovation (startups, SMEs), third step is when you discuss how you will sell the product together, and create commission fee percentages for each of you based on the summary costs and how much you price the innovative solution.
- In case of doing a business collaboration for innovation (startups, SMEs), fourth step is to calculate a timeframe when you start providing a commission fee to your collaboration partner after your costs or part of your costs are covered.
Check if you have fear to ask for your fee in this article written by our partner and psychologist Celia Avila-Rauch, where she mentioned four fears related to ask for your feed, or in this case your budget for innovation: Fear of negotiation, fear of rejection, fear of losing the contract, or fear of not deserving money.