Cambridge Ultrasonics

Technical Audit

A technical audit is often required as part of due diligence checking before investment in new businesses by venture capital businesses, business angles or for business-to-business deals.

Cambridge Ultrasonics can perform technical audits on R&D done by third parties, although occasionally clients request technical audits of their own R&D projects.

A typical example, might be a business that is considering licensing technology from a university. Cambridge Ultrasonics will review and preferably meet with staff from the university, then analyse their findings and write a report.

The report would include:

• Tthe technical viability of the technology.
• Probable costs of further development of a product.
• Technical factors likely to enable or to prevent success.
• The probable prime cost of any product.
• The capacity of the university to deliver further product development.
• Results of a patent search with possible implications.
• Competitor search.

Cambridge Ultrasonics can also perform market reviews and investigate the route to market for products, with financial recommendations based upon risk analysis of expected values of discounted cash flows.

Market review

An example of a market review was a start-up company that intended to launch an unbranded financial service for use over the internet, trading in stocks and shares. The business model was that banks and building societies would brand the service as their own but the start-up business would make the trades. Cambridge Ultrasonics looked into how to market this product to prospective clients of the start-up - banks and building societies.

One problem was that it proved difficult to get access to top management of high street banks for their opinions on the new service. This barier would definitely be important to finding early adopters of the share trading system - a serious problem for the start-up business. Alternative clients for the start-up might be found through affiliation organizations, such as professional bodies with memberships so that the service could be launched through these affiliates while larger customers were sought. The market review alerted the client to an unexpected problem and gave a profitable alternative route to market.