Picture a lab that spends two years developing a coating method that works. A manufacturer in the same region has been trying to solve that exact problem and has never heard of the lab. Neither side is at fault: the researcher describes the result in the vocabulary of a journal, the manufacturer searches in the vocabulary of a production line, and the two descriptions never meet.
Science-to-business (S2B) marketing exists to close that gap. It applies marketing principles to research, so universities and research institutes can offer their expertise, facilities, and results to the companies and agencies that could use them. The name follows B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer), and B2B is the closest relative. The comparison explains most of how S2B works, so this article follows it.
Takeaways
- S2B marketing treats research as something with buyers: companies and agencies that need a capability, a result, or expertise.
- Its closest relative is B2B marketing. Buyers are few, technical, and careful, so decisions take months and rest on trust and evidence.
- Münster University of Applied Sciences developed the concept, and it treats industry’s needs as the starting point for research.
- Companies get expertise and lab facilities without funding all of their R&D, and researchers get funding and a clearer sense of which problems have buyers.
- The hardest parts are mismatched timelines, unclear rules for sharing technology, and writing about science in terms a business reader can act on.
What science-to-business marketing is
The idea comes from the Science-to-Business Marketing Research Centre at Münster University of Applied Sciences in Germany. The centre starts from the view that market mechanisms work on the research market too: companies, agencies, and other organizations want research, and they choose among the institutions that offer it.
In practice, the product is research competence, capacity, or results. That might be a test method, access to a specialized lab, a prototype, or a joint project on a new material. The customer might be a manufacturer, a clinic network, or a government department. The approach borrows from B2B marketing, service marketing, and technology and innovation marketing, and it puts the customer’s need ahead of the lab’s existing output when deciding what to pursue.
Why the B2B comparison fits
A company that licenses a technology or commissions a study buys the way any B2B customer buys. Several people weigh in: the engineer wants to see the data, finance wants a price and schedule, and legal wants the intellectual property terms. The decision takes months and depends on whether the buyer trusts the seller. Marketing for that kind of sale favors direct contact, technical content, trade shows, and relationships that carry from one project to the next.
Research adds three complications that an ordinary B2B seller seldom faces. The product is often unfinished, so the seller describes what a team can do and what it has found so far. The seller also has to explain the work without giving away intellectual property. And the people doing the selling are scientists, whose training rewards precision and caution, and many of them have never written a sentence meant to persuade a purchasing manager.
Who is involved
Three groups take part: research institutions, companies, and governments. Governments pay for a large share of university research and want to see it used. Canada’s health research agency, for example, ran a Science to Business (S2B) Program launched in 2006, which funded business schools to recruit health-research PhDs into MBA programs so that more scientists would have the skills to commercialize their field.
Biology, chemistry, and physics produce the most obvious cases, such as food, medicine, and energy. The logic reaches further, though. A Polish S2B model applies it to labor protection in industry.
How research gets marketed
Trade shows and direct outreach still matter, because B2B buyers like to meet the people they might work with. The slower, steadier work happens online. A technical website, a scientific company blog, and other content marketing answer the questions an engineer types into a search engine long before anyone picks up a phone. Journals now cover the field too, such as minib (Marketing of Scientific and Research Organizations), published by the Polish Institute of Aviation.
What each side gets
Society
Research funded by taxpayers reaches use sooner when someone has planned how it will get there. The Münster centre frames the issue as a question: successful companies shape their research, development, and production around what customers need, so why don’t research institutions do the same? The outcomes people point to are new products, new jobs, and a faster return on public funding.
Researchers
Many researchers work for long stretches in isolation, and nothing in that routine asks who might use the result. Thinking about buyers early changes the project. It shows where private or government funding might come from and which problems have an audience. It also gives scientists a more entrepreneurial role, which some will welcome and others will not.
Companies
R&D is expensive, and most companies cannot fund all of it. Working with a university gives a company access to specialists and lab facilities, and public funding of that university covers part of the cost. Larger firms use the model too. The German chemicals group Evonik set up Science-to-Business Centers inside the company, and for its energy efficiency center it selected 21 projects from 230 proposals and committed more than €50 million in additional research funds through 2013. Those centers sit inside Evonik, so the example shows the idea at corporate scale.
Where S2B marketing gets stuck
Different clocks
A research team often cannot say when a result will arrive, and careful experiments take the time they take. A business works against budgets, deadlines, and competitors who may reach the market first. Each side can misread the other: the scientist hears pressure to cut corners, and the company hears a lack of commitment. Two Australian researchers link reliable partnerships to trust and commitment on both sides, and that trust usually starts with specifics. Agree on milestones, define what counts as a result, and decide at the outset how delays will be reported.
Unclear rules for sharing technology
Who owns a result when a company funds part of the work? When can the team publish? How much can a brochure reveal before a patent is filed? Institutions need answers to these questions before the marketing starts. The Münster centre was set up partly to study how university and company projects work and to share what it learns with other institutions.
Writing for a buyer
A paper reports what was found and how confident the authors are. A buyer wants to know what problem the work solves, what evidence supports it, what working together would involve, and what happens next. Put those four answers where a non-specialist can find them, and keep the evidence in. A claim a technical buyer can check builds trust, and an inflated one ends the conversation. The habits of science help here: state what you measured, say what you did not test, and skip claims you cannot support, as in our piece on avoiding greenwashing.
Have someone who edits scientific text read the draft before it goes out. A board-certified editor in the life sciences can catch the wording that a non-specialist would misread. If the material also has to cross languages, machine translation tends to flatten technical terms, which we explain in our article on Google Translate and scientific publications.
Where to start
If you run a research group, a technology transfer office, or a scientific company, this order works for most projects:
- Name two or three types of buyer who could use your work, and write down the problem each one is trying to solve.
- Describe your work in those terms on one page: the problem, the evidence, what a collaboration would involve, and the next step.
- Settle ownership and publication terms with your legal or technology transfer office before the page goes public.
- Publish where those buyers look: a technical page or blog post for each problem, and a presence at the trade show they already attend.
None of this suits every project. Early basic research may have no buyer yet, and forcing a commercial pitch onto it can mislead both sides.
If your organization is putting research in front of business buyers and the writing is the sticking point, get in touch. We write and edit for scientific companies and research organizations, and we can go through your marketing copy with you.
