Area Science Park, a public research organisation of the Ministry for Universities and Research, launches Deep Tech Revolution, a new €1 million initiative dedicated to supporting innovative high-tech business projects. The programme is designed to promote and support frontier research and deeptech innovation with a focus on four sectors identified as key areas for the development of high-impact technologies, namely materials science, advanced digital, green energy chains and life sciences.
The programme provides non-reimbursable funding for five innovative projects of up to EUR 200,000 each, half of which is provided in cash and half in the form of services. The cash contribution is intended to cover expenses related to research and development activities, such as consultancy costs, the acquisition of intangible assets, tools and equipment for carrying out technical and scientific research and experimental development activities.
The remaining 50% is provided in the form of business acceleration and growth support services and high-tech services. Researchers and startupper promoters of funded projects will for the first time have privileged access to Area Science Park research infrastructures and laboratories. These include laboratories for instrumental investigations, structural, cellular and molecular biology, and the Laboratory of Genomics and Epigenomics; instrumentation for the analysis of nanomaterials and innovative materials for energy with the Laboratory of Electron Microscopy; the High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure with the Data Engineering laboratory; and the network of demonstrators of the Digital Innovation Hub.
The programme, which will start after the summer, will last twelve months and will also include two international study visits that will put participants in direct contact with the main global innovation and research ecosystems through visits to centres of excellence and meetings with experts, entrepreneurs and researchers; as well as training and capacity-building bootcamps and networking activities through ad hoc events and meetings to foster collaboration, investment and strategic growth through connections with key players. Also envisaged is the possibility of awarding the winners an annual research grant for a young researcher to be involved in the research and development activities to be carried out in the framework of the submitted project.
The call to participate in the Deep Tech Revolution programme is open: it is aimed at start-ups, spin-offs, individual researchers and research teams with projects that aim to develop or validate cutting-edge deep tech solutions, demonstrating the technical feasibility of the proposed solution and preparing it for industrial or commercial applications. Candidate projects will be evaluated by an international technical-scientific committee according to criteria including the innovativeness of the solution, potential impact, scalability and replicability, and effective use of high-tech services offered. The deadline for applications, to be submitted as indicated on the Area Science Park website, is 30 June 2025.
“The Deep Tech Revolution programme represents a further tool in the development of the Area’s multi-year strategy, with a view to full integration between the traditional innovation services for SMEs, the generation of technology start-ups, and the activities linked to research infrastructures and high-tech laboratories that the institution has implemented in recent years,” says Area Science Park President Caterina Petrillo in a note. We chose to invest in the programme with our own funding because we think it is crucial to support deep tech by promoting project ideas and solutions with a very high potential impact on society, even if not immediate. A solution arising from research may not be merely incremental, as is generally the case in technological innovation, but disruptive because it is qualitatively new. If the market is able to absorb it, we can witness a true paradigm shift’.
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