15 July 2024
On June 27, 2024, as part of the 3rd CloudEARTHi Conference on Academic Education and its Impact on Entrepreneurship and Sustainability (Varna, Bulgaria) researchers of the Academ.City ecosystem – Vira Filatova and Olena Tsyplitska held a workshop for innovators "How do technologies pass the first valley of death?".
On the way from an idea to serial production, scientists often encounter such a phenomenon as "technology death", when there are difficulties with the validation of the technology outside the laboratory, and in the future they may experience risks to the project related to market entry and scaling.
Understanding the Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) of the development allows timely preparation for possible complications in the implementation of an innovative project. The content of the nine levels of TRL and the gaps between R&D (research and development) and R&I (research and innovation) were discussed at the workshop by the Ph.D., Senior Researcher of the Physics of Phase Transformation Department and Head of the project and innovation group G.V. Kurdyumov Institute for Metal Physics of the NASU Vira Filatova.
The development of technologies and products is not only about research and experimental validation, it is also about whether the scientific result will be commercialized and whether an investor will fund it. Therefore, to track the progress of the project, along with TRL, it is advisable to determine the Market Readiness Level (MRL) and the Investment Readiness Level (IRL) explained at the workshop by Olena Tsyplitska, Doctor of Economics, Head of the Open Innovation Laboratory of Kyiv Academic University.
The participants of the conference were informed regarding the sources of project funding and current EU programs for various levels of technological readiness.
The researchers from various countries, in particular, Ukraine, Bulgaria, United Kingdom and Norway, attended the workshop and formed international teams to perform a case study task about the startup from Ukraine.
