Our Innovation Partners
Innovating today and in the future must be far more collaborative than it has been in the past. Most companies have embraced a more open innovation structure and process over the last two decades and university researchers have almost always operated in a collaborative manner. The reasons are simple: breadth and speed. Even the largest research organization has only a small fraction of the people and ideas available and ideas are the raw material of innovation. The only way to accelerate progress is to harness the power of far more people and groups productively.
MGP’s innovation process is built on the premise that we screen many ideas from many different sources, pursue early stage R&D work with the best and most fastidious individuals and organizations and focus our internal resources on late stage development and commercialization. We have a number of collaborative R&D efforts underway that harness world class academic talent, our commercial know-how and capabilities, and internal and external funding resources. We continue to make progress on a variety of food and industrial ingredient fronts that would represent a step change in value generation for MGP and the agricultural economy of Kansas and the U.S. in general.
We are involved in research projects with individuals and laboratories associated with the University of Nebraska, Kansas State University, University of Kansas, Pittsburg State University, Benedictine College, Iowa State University, the USDA, and the Kansas Bioscience Authority. In addition to these projects, we have historic R&D relationships with several other universities domestically and abroad.
In addition to our ongoing collaboration with academic laboratories, MGP also has extensive and ongoing research and development relationships with our Joint Venture partners in the U.S. and Europe.
MGP has a long history of collaborating with external R&D partners, and has been successful in commercializing technology developed within this framework. Enormous opportunities for more, better and faster developments exist with our CPG and industrial customers, suppliers and JV partners. As a company, we are committed to leveraging our investment in innovation and focusing or energies on those activities that we do uniquely well to drive value growth.