Mobilising the IP in Europe's deep tech
Updated: Apr 17
Viorel Peca at the European Innovation Council discusses what Europe's largest investor in deep-tech ventures expects at each stage of scaling high-risk ideas with the potential to become gamechangers
Viorel Peca, head of transition, European Innovation Council
The intellectual property in Europe’s deep tech is now being mobilised to upgrade its capacity to create value at the same level as the United States and China. Historically, Europe has fallen behind in innovation, even though it has remained a research superpower. Now it is accepting the challenge to catch the next wave of technologies and bring them to market.
The European Innovation Council, a €10 billion programme of the European Union established in 2021, has been supporting breakthrough technologies and start-ups in deep tech with the capacity to scale. In its first three years, it supported over 500 start-ups, 275 advanced research programmes and 140 commercialisation projects. In the process, the EIC has now become Europe’s largest investor in early-stage deep-tech ventures and is making an impact on the scaling of European companies, having supported over 150 centaurs (valuations above €100 million), out of which 15 have a valuation above €500 million including eight over €1 billion (Impact Report, EIC, 2023).
In the EIC’s programmes, IP has a fundamental role to play in the whole cycle of identifying, testing, launching and scaling ideas that are high risk, but have the potential to become gamechangers for our economy or society. For us IP is not a matter of ticking boxes. We are supporting projects to protect IP and encouraging ventures to file patents as part of a well-thought-out IP strategy in support of their business goals.
Pathfinder IP
At the start, in our early-stage projects, such as Pathfinder, we want researchers to think about the competitive landscape in which they operate and the IP they could create, not just for the sake of filing a patent (as important as it may be), but as the foundation of a possible exploitation strategy. It can be eye opening when you investigate the space around your technology and see who else is playing in the same space. It will help you to identify your market and build your IP portfolio around it.
With partners, such as the European Patent Office, we can analyse the inventive merit and the proposed future IP strategy of the proposals. In 2024, out of the 81 proposals that were invited to the jury phase of the evaluation, 19 had no patent as yet, 40 had applications pending and 22 had patent protection. Of the 40 selected for funding, 36 had good prospects for patentability and 31 had promising patents of their own, which indicates the importance of IP, while showing that having a patent is not a goal in itself.
Transition IP
Further on, in Transition projects which invest up to €2.5 million into further maturation of a breakthrough technology and its business plan, we expect a clear sense of how the IP is going to be further developed and monetised. Here we recognise that there is not a one size fits all as you go towards the market. Researchers and project members can embrace different roles from the more technical to the more entrepreneurial and we build the programme around them. What is important is that the results of a promising project do not remain in the lab while our competitors move resolutely towards the market.
Many projects or ventures don’t take account of different routes to market: many overlook licensing as an option and miss out the additional revenue streams it can create. Of course, this route needs to make sense in the overall IP and business strategy.
Accelerator IP
For candidates looking to scale with the EIC Accelerator programme, which awards up to €2.5 million in grant and coinvests up to €10 million in equity, we expect not just the IP rights to be securely in place, but an active strategy to manage them. It’s proving a worthwhile question to ask. For every euro we invest, we crowd in private capital that contributes between three and five times as much.
IP with the power to transform
Within this chain of value that IP inspires, we can’t expect everyone to get it all right. The passage of a technology’s readiness level from its creation (at TRL 1) to being ready for market (at TRL 9) is long and complicated. At the start, in particular, it can be difficult to imagine that the IP could eventually have a huge value.
As part of our programmes, we run a series of support services for our deep-tech beneficiaries at each stage of their development, whether it is coaching, training, business model exploration or even venture building. These support services can bring the next venture up to speed and increase the chances of success in a competitive landscape.
For our programmes, we are equally happy for projects or their spin-offs to draw on local support, whether from local accelerators or a university’s technology transfer office. It’s also why we are delighted to contribute to the latest edition of Managing Intellectual Property Today which gives founders and innovators a vivid and practical sense of the role that IP in all its forms is now playing in inspiring high growth and capturing value.
In Europe, where only one third of patents are commercialised (Competitiveness Compass, EU, 2025), prospects for high-growth tech remain far from perfect, of course. By number of start-ups or spin-offs, Europe might be catching up with the US, but the scaling-up is where the issue is. European venture capitalists are smaller in size, attract less capital than their US counterparts and are limited by scale-up capital. Our goal is to create a strong financial ecosystem in which start-ups and spin-offs can thrive and, at the EIC, we are now doing more to support the scale-up phase by making higher investments, ie, between €10 million and €30 million (STEP, scale-up scheme, EIC).
In Europe, we all might be having our doubts about our future prospects and what our priorities should be. We can, at least, be confident that our research will continue to be amongst the best in the world. To restore our prosperity, however, we must keep learning how to identify and develop IP with the power to transform our economy, so we are amongst the leaders of the next wave of disruptive technologies.
• This foreword by Viorel Peca, head of transition at the European Innovation Council, first appeared in Managing Intellectual Property Today, 2025 edition, published by Novaro, ISBN: 978-1-0685644-1-3. See here for further details.
