Innovation Readiness Assessment toward Research Commercialization: Case of Surfactants for Food Processing

Abstract

Determining the readiness of research toward commercialization becomes significant issues encountered by the institution working on research, innovation and technology development. Particularly in food processing area, the issue is much more involving other aspects aside from technological matter, hence, an assessment tool should be consider these aspects altogether to capture integrated perspective. This study explored the use of Innovation Readiness Level to measures the maturity of research from the perspective of technology, market, organization, partnership and risk. Case of surfactant researches in the Research Center for Chemistry, Indonesian Institute of Sciences will be deployed as examples of study. According to the assessment, it has been obtained the surfactant recommended for further development towards commercialization of R & D results for food processing, i.e. Glycerol Mono Stearate (GMS), which has reached the level of IRL 3. This finding resulted some implications for improvements strategies to foster the research toward commercialization.