1. Send off a proposal through our submission form
2. Our team review every submission and respond quickly to let you know whether we see the potential at this stage. If we don’t think it’s viable, we’ll let you know within six weeks.
3. If we think it’s something we can work with, we’ll discuss a partnership that works for both parties. You may be looking for a joint development project, sales and marketing expertise, a licensing agreement, or a combination of all these.
It might make sense for you to talk to our venture capital business Tate & Lyle Ventures, so we’ll put you in touch if need be.
Read more about them here
4. To protect your intellectual property and to protect us, we’ll ask you to accept our terms and conditions before you submit your project outline. Once this is complete, you’ll be directed to an online form that collects all the information we need – who you are, what your opportunity is, and what plans you have for it.
Open Innovation is all about straightforward partnerships; we’ve done our best to make the submissions process as straightforward possible, but here are the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.
If you can’t see what you’re looking for, get in touch.
FAQS
Don’t forget to include your contact details. Then, when describing your project, make sure you give us an overview of your innovation, telling us what it does and what commercial applications you imagine for it. What benefits does it bring? If it is an ingredient, how is it different from similar ingredients? If it is a new technology, what does it enable?
Absolutely. Our Open Innovation partnerships come in different shapes and sizes including: licence agreements, equity investments, collaborations, development of products and purchasing of technologies. If you have a particular arrangement in mind, we’d be happy to discuss it.
Yes. These are designed to protect your rights as well as ours. We ask everyone to agree to the terms and conditions before submitting their proposal.
Our terms and conditions protect your invention and your ability to seek protection from patents if you have not done so already. Since we may already be working on something similar, they also protect Tate & Lyle’s ability to patent our own inventions. We advise you to speak to an intellectual property advisor before submitting information about innovations not protected by patent or by a patent application.
We're interested in a very wide range of food and beverage ingredients and technologies. The 'what we look for' pages detail the specific areas that we're keen to make partnerships in.
We are always open to great new ideas! The strongest proposals, however, are likely to have been developed beyond the idea stage, with some proof of concept and evidence of the benefits of the ingredient or technology you are working on.
We both do. Our Open Innovation team will review your submission and decide if it could be a good fit for our innovation strategy at the current time. Depending on the nature of your proposal, we may ask you to provide more information, contact you to set up a meeting, talk to you about the project or begin discussing the best type of partnership. But, you are fully in control of your proposal at every step. And if your idea doesn’t match our requirements at this stage, we won’t keep you hanging on – we follow up on all submissions within six weeks.
We’ll confirm we’ve received your submission within 48 hours. If your proposal is not a fit for us, we’ll get back to you within six weeks. If your proposal could lead to a partnership, one of our team will get in touch to start a conversation. Depending on the type of proposal and our commercial arrangement, the next stages vary in length – but we’ll make you aware of timings at the start of the project. Speed of innovation and speed to market are essential parts of our business strategy, so we always do our best make sure the development of a successful new product or technology is straightforward, fast and transparent.
Interested in finding out about our New Product Development?
Our global innovation capabilities are backed up by state of the art facilities and cutting-edge technology.
Looking for investment?
If you are looking for an external source of investment, get in touch with our separately managed venture capital arm, Tate & Lyle Ventures.