How to overcome the valley of death in advanced technological fields: Designing and testing the blueprint of a deep-tech venture builder

Description

A vital problem of the European economy has long been its limited capacity to transform technological inventions into successful new companies that help to address major challenges in, for example, energy production and storage. This study focuses on how to overcome the so-called "valley of death" in the case of deep-tech innovations. We designed a Deep-Tech Venture (DTV) builder that creates, supports, and accelerates new ventures arising from deep-tech breakthroughs accomplished in leading research institutes in Europe. This approach to building DTVs incorporates key elements of extant theories and tools in the field of entrepreneurship but also moves beyond this contemporary body of knowledge. It provides a comprehensive system for creating and scaling deep-tech ventures—the most complex and risky, yet most impactful breed of ventures. The DTV blueprint was implemented and further developed in a venture builder in the Netherlands (called HighTechXL), which sources technologies from leading research institutes such as CERN, European Space Agency, and University of Copenhagen. The initial results are highly promising. The main contribution of this study is a comprehensive system design for building deep-tech ventures which is (a) grounded in the literature on technology sourcing, entrepreneurship, ecosystems, entrepreneurial finance, and talent acquisition and (b) tested in a major European venture builder.

Period	24 Oct 2023 → 26 Oct 2023
Event title	9th European Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation: Industrial Innovation for Open Strategic Autonomy
Event type	Conference
Location	Sevilla, SpainShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International