How Shared Intelligence Turns Scouting Into Signed Partnerships

In industrial innovation, finding the right external partner is rarely a straight line. Often, the real challenge isn't finding a vendor, it's figuring out what you actually need in the first place.

That's the story behind one of Novable's longer-running scouting engagements, with Etex, a global leader in lightweight construction solutions and one of Novable's early clients. It's a good illustration of how a search can evolve significantly over time and how the right combination of technology and human support turns that evolution into something concrete.

Etex has been public about why this matters to them. Their own Open Innovation approach is built on the idea that collaborating with outside partners, customers, start-ups, scale-ups, academic institutions, industrial leaders is essential to move faster, and that this kind of collaboration spans everything from early-stage academic research to applied development with start-ups and industrial partners. Over the last six years, that approach has led Etex to scout around 800 technology partners and launch more than 150 collaborative projects. The engagement below is one concrete example of that strategy in motion.

A search that changes shape

Etex came to Novable looking to improve a specialised part of their product line. What "the right partner" meant kept shifting as the search progressed, the target moved and sharpened across several campaigns as the team learned more about what was actually achievable and what the business really needed.

Neither Etex nor Novable knew the exact destination when the search started. What made the difference wasn't a smarter first guess, it was staying close enough to the process to adjust as the picture became clearer.

Why traditional search falls short here

A lot of industrial and manufacturing subcontractors, especially specialised, regional ones have limited web visibility. Some run on a two-page site with no real SEO. That makes them functionally invisible to a standard Google search, even when they're exactly the kind of company a client needs.

This is where combining a platform with hands-on advisory work matters.

The platform turns what would otherwise be days of manual search into structured, reviewable campaigns, matching companies surfaced quickly, with results exportable directly into slides for internal stakeholders. Every campaign also builds a reusable internal database for future projects, not just a one-off list.

The advisory layer picks up where online visibility runs out. When a good-fit company doesn't show up cleanly online, Novable's client success team steps in directly, reaching out anonymously on the client's behalf, having real conversations, and qualifying interest and capacity by phone. It's slower than a search bar, but it reaches companies a platform alone never would.

Shared intelligence, in practice

The mechanism that actually made the strategy pivot possible wasn't a single tool, it was the loop between the two. Regular, short, tightly-focused check-ins let Etex and Novable's team compare what the platform was surfacing against what advisory conversations were revealing on the ground. That back-and-forth is what let the target sharpen, campaign after campaign, until it matched what the business actually needed.

The outcome, by the numbers

Once the final need was clear, Novable's advisory outreach moved fast, validated contacts delivered within about a month. The campaign's results:

• 35 companies initially identified through the Novable platform
• 9 highly qualified companies shortlisted for deeper review
• 3 additional validated contacts hand-delivered by Novable's advisory team after direct, anonymous outreach
• 2 strategic partnerships officially signed, one sourced directly from the platform, one secured through advisory outreach

Changing the innovation bottleneck

By streamlining the partner-discovery phase, Novable fundamentally shifted how Etex's team approaches this kind of search. As Jean-Philippe Boisvert, R&D lead at Etex, put it:

"I found the tool extremely practical, powerful. And it saves time."

He added:

‍"A company like Etex found real value in using the Novable tool to establish partnerships with companies tailored to our development and innovation needs."

With Novable handling identification and initial outreach, Etex's main bottleneck was no longer finding candidates, it became having the internal capacity to qualify, test, and operationalise every good match the search turned up. A good problem to have, and a sign the search worked.

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