VERHAERT NEW PRODUCTS & SERVICES NV

Their core work

Verhaert is a Belgian product innovation and development company that helps businesses turn ideas into market-ready products and services. They specialize in bridging the gap between technology and business — whether that means helping space technologies find commercial applications on Earth, designing IoT-enabled products, or managing open innovation processes for SMEs. Their core competence lies in product design, technology scouting, and innovation management, applied across a wide range of sectors from healthcare devices to environmental adaptation solutions.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In their early H2020 period (2016–2018), Verhaert focused on innovation ecosystems and technology transfer — helping SMEs adopt open innovation, incubating space-derived business ideas, and working on sensor integration. From 2019 onward, they shifted toward applying their product development skills to concrete societal challenges: climate adaptation, water management, Earth observation for industry, and even medical nanorobotics. The evolution suggests a company moving from "innovation process consulting" toward "innovation applied to hard technical problems."

Verhaert is moving toward technically demanding, impact-driven projects — expect future interest in health tech, climate solutions, and IoT applications rather than pure innovation management.

How they like to work

Verhaert overwhelmingly participates as a partner rather than leading (6 out of 7 projects), with only one coordination role (POINT.IoT). With 88 unique consortium partners across 19 countries, they are a well-connected node that brings product development and user-needs expertise into diverse teams. Their role in consortia is typically as the partner who translates research outputs into product concepts and market-facing solutions — a "bridge" member rather than a scientific lead.

Verhaert has built a broad European network of 88 unique partners across 19 countries, indicating strong cross-border reach and comfort working in diverse, multinational consortia. No single geographic cluster dominates — they appear to connect flexibly across Western, Southern, and Northern Europe.

What sets them apart

Verhaert is not a research lab and not a consultancy — they are a product innovation company that sits exactly where research meets the market. This makes them unusually versatile: they can contribute user-needs analysis, product design, and go-to-market strategy to any consortium that needs to turn scientific results into something tangible. For consortium builders, they fill the critical gap between "we proved it works in the lab" and "someone will actually buy this."

Highlights from their portfolio

• TransformAr
  Their largest project by far (EUR 552K), focused on scaling up climate adaptation solutions for water — signals a strategic move into environmental impact work.
• POINT.IoT
  Their only coordinator role, fusing IoT with GNSS satellite technologies — demonstrates ability to lead cross-domain technology integration projects.
• ANGIE
  Surprising entry into medical nanorobotics (magnetic nanodevices for drug delivery), showing willingness to apply product design skills to frontier health technologies.