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I read the previous comment as: there wasn’t anyone at the end trying to help make it actually commercialized


But not every R&D project can or should lead to a commercial product right away. I work in a big corp and sometimes the tech you invested in, even if the PoC was great and all successful, doesn't fit in any final product because of thousands of other constraints.

But I also see lots of small 'mindshare' changes thanks to those 'it can be done' projects. The important steps seem to be to first unlock the first TRLs, then find PoCs on real products to inspire (and increase TRLs) tech directors and product managers that they need to invest the next millions into an big and still uncertain shift, and to underinvest in other important parts of their products. In the case of tech push you often end up with a new shiny tech that can't be used right away. So, mostly, it's about climbing the maturity ladder, and be ready for the very small openings in the product development cycle to shoe your new tech in.

In the case of customer pull or market pull, the lead time of such projects makes it too late to ask for external help, and no research grant wants to participate in 'product development' (not their job). So the tech is usually badly implemented and leaves a sour taste.

What I see as positive: if you have a great tech idea and available resources, and great academic/labs contacts, you can get the money, with little resistance (but yes, lots of admin work) with either European or national/regional grants.

IIRC the 2014 version of SPARK was designed and developed through a French civilian R&D funding project : http://www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite/ The project was clearly a success there (although I don't know about ROI or profitability for AdaCore on this tech). Working with innovative SMBs is a great way to get funding in France and most of the projects that I've seen tend to conclude in new products... for the SMB. But the scale is low there (<4MEUR), so it also helps to accept failure ('only' 4m 'wasted'...).


'TRL' ?


Sorry, jargon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

Funny thing, the wiki page explicitly cites horizon2020 (which one of the GPs criticized): "The European Commission advised EU-funded research and innovation projects to adopt the scale in 2010.[1] TRLs were consequently used in 2014 in the EU Horizon 2020 program. In 2013, the TRL scale was further canonized by the ISO 16290:2013 standard.[1] A comprehensive approach and discussion of TRLs has been published by the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations (EARTO).[3] Extensive criticism of the adoption of TRL scale by the European Union was published in The Innovation Journal, stating that the "concreteness and sophistication of the TRL scale gradually diminished as its usage spread outside its original context (space programs)"."


It’s more than that in my experience, often the concept was a non starter, or the output is nothing an enterprise couldn’t do it self if so motivated, and certainly aren’t going to bother picking through the mess of some academic code base.




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