ROSEMONT, ILL. — The Dairy Research Institute has launched an open innovation program and web site to seek existing solutions and technologies from within and outside the dairy industry to help accelerate research and meet specific dairy industry needs.

“The Dairy Research Institute is committed to sound, scientific research to better understand the value of dairy products and accelerate dairy product and ingredient innovation,” said Gregory Miller, president of the Dairy Research Institute. “The open innovation program expands our view to ensure the dairy industry benefits from the best innovative ideas — whether from within or outside our industry.”

The web site, DRIResearchSubmission.com, is currently accepting submissions related to the identification of a biomarker for dairy food intake, novel methods to further improve quality of fresh or low-sodium cheeses, and methods to prevent biofilm formation in dairy processing equipment.

Overall, the program seeks to discover solutions to challenges that already may exist in other industries, reduce research time and dollars spent to solve industry-wide issues and decrease time to activation.

The Dairy Research Institute will complete a technical review of all submissions and evaluate each for scalability, pilot testing and application to the dairy industry.