Urweb.tv Offers a New Channel for Open Innovation Business Development

Chapel Hill, NC, June 15, 2011 --(PR.com)-- The dark clouds of high unemployment, tight credit and soaring deficits do have a silver lining, especially if you are an entrepreneur or a wannabe entrepreneur. In the search for the next blockbuster, companies have begun, at an ever increasing rate, turning to open innovation as part of their business development strategy. The latest to join is Glaxo Smith Kline. Their Consumer Products Division has rolled out a new open innovation portal. The challenge in open innovation is how to connect with those hard-to-find inventors who may have what a company is looking for.

One site that offers a channel to these elusive inventors is www.urweb.tv. The site created by MMC Productions is a rich media marketing vehicle used by Universities, Federal Labs, and Emerging Companies to accelerate the commercialization of promising technologies. Now businesses are exploring ways to leverage this hard to reach audience to fill their innovations needs.

MMC Productions in Chapel Hill, NC initially designed urweb.tv as a repository for target market rich media projects undertaken for University and Federal Laboratories such as, NC State, Wake Forest, NASA, the Department of Defense and others. To promote these technologies for commercialization, MMC created a customized rich media marketing vehicle called a Cyberpitch, consisting of a high quality embedded video, text, images, links to papers and contact information. All their clients had to do was send a link to a prospect and with the click of the mouse they could watch a video and find all sorts of useful information about the technology. "The idea behind the Cyberpitch was to develop a piece of media for busy executives, that answered in five minutes or less the question "What have you got and why should I be interested," says MMC's President Peter Doyle.

It worked, technologies got licensed and funded. Over time through a mixture of targeted and viral marketing, www.urweb.tv gained a visitor profile of economic development agencies, multi nationals, small businesses, as well as scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and investors. "Urweb.tv was never going to be a mega traffic portal with millions of hits," explains Peter Doyle "but that did not matter, it was who those visitors were." It is this very highly desirable hard-to-reach audience that is now being sought by companies such as Procter and Gamble and Glaxo Smith Kline Consumer Products. "It is exciting, because no-one has the magic bullet for success, but everyone is willing to find out what works and what doesn't," says Peter Doyle "it also brings to the table a lot of people who never had a shot before, that is a good thing."

So while the economy is still shaky, the future uncertain, opportunity beckons, and the next “big” blockbuster could be just a couple of clicks away.

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