06 Oct How to be better prepared for tenders and commercial opportunities
Tenders are a great place to find opportunities for consulting, contract research and education and training.
Projects secured through tenders can allow researchers to grow and diversify their research funding base. It is also a great way to make an impact by working to solve real-world problems faced by industry and government. Furthermore, it can pave the way for partnership development and lead to grants and funding opportunities.
How to be prepared for tender opportunities?
You can prepare in advance a commercially focused CV of about two pages to highlight the most relevant publications and any commercial experience.
You can consider writing or collating a capability statement for you, your team, or your school. Capability Statements summarise the types of expertise you can bring to bear and what outcome you can produce. For a specific topic, you can find out who else in your department and school, and across the University, might be interested and keen to collaborate with you.
Consider how you could resource a small, medium, and large project, to support new commercial opportunities within your current workload. Assess when and how you can take on more work or whether you want to assemble a broader team and utilise more junior members.
Finally, try to use every opportunity to talk to potential client organisations to find out what they want to achieve in your area of expertise. What are their challenges and goals? Are there any tenders coming up? Is there a strategic plan or budget?
All these actions improve your ability to respond quickly when an opportunity presents itself and ensures you can provide tailored responses to technical questions when opportunities arise from clients and colleagues.
For more information on tender responses and opportunities, contact our business development team at consulting@anuenterprise.com.au.