From Tech to Deep Tech
Fostering collaborations between Corporates and Startups
Technological innovation is not new. Over the past decade, however, a powerful wave of innovation based on digital platforms and apps has arisen and become synonymous with the tech industry.
Unlike existing digital platforms and apps, future “deep” technologies will advance the technological frontier. Deep-tech innovations are disruptive solutions built around unique, protected or hard-to-reproduce technological or scientific advances.
Deep-tech innovations lie at the crossroads of massive shifts in demand led by megatrends (such as global climate change, demographic shifts, resource scarcity, and an ageing population) and scientific progress (such as the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas microbial adaptive immune system) and are impacting all industries.
Specifics of Deep-Tech Innovation
Companies today can start, test and scale their solutions with fewer resources and considerably faster than ever before. Deep-tech innovation also benefits from technological advances that have substantially lowered the costs of starting a company. Even so, a deep-tech startup is slower and more expensive to get off the ground than a digital startup, for several reasons:
• Strong research base: In deep tech, product development depends on fundamental research and/or advanced R&D, which require support from a strong set of advanced skills, knowledge, and infrastructure, and lengthen the products’ time to market.
• Heavy industrialization process: Aside from deep tech based on ICT, most products in this field are hardware — often based on advanced materials and resources — requiring highly developed industrial skills to procure, manufacture, and scale. Such products are much more difficult to scale than products associated with the internet and mobile technologies tend to be.
• Large investment needs: The infrastructure, skills, and resources needed by a deep-tech startup require substantial funding capacity over an extended period.
• Yet-to-be-defined commercial application: The end product specifications may be undefined well into the process. The blockchain developed as a specific technological solution for Bitcoin, for example, opened the door to a new market in finance that its developers did not foresee.
Toward a Well-Functioning Deep-Tech Innovation Ecosystem
Research has established that innovation depends on smoothly functioning innovation ecosystems — combinations of people, companies, infrastructure, and government policies linked through informal and formal networks. Collaborations are crucial to the concept of Open Innovation, which — unlike closed, in-house innovation processes — requires that companies source and collaborate with others.
Open innovation is not a new paradigm. Already a number of established companies have created strategic partnerships with each other to develop new, innovative solutions. On the university side, tech transfer centers that seek to collaborate with businesses have almost become the norm.
The most notable rising trend, however, is the growing role of startups and their increasingly important collaborations with corporates. Startups today bet on long-term and high-risk deep-tech innovation — such as storage of information in DNA, or antimatter propulsion — that used to be the prerogative of public research. Collaborations between startups and corporates began in ICT and biopharma but are now spreading through all industries.
From a Collaborative perspective, I believe ecosystems and open innovation are crucial in deep tech. This is due to the aforementioned specifics of deep-tech innovation, which pose daunting challenges for a young company. Because of those specifics, corporates and other stakeholders need to apply new approaches to the task of accelerating deep-tech innovation.
Watch this space for more bits of Deep Tech resources; particularly BLOCKCHAIN
