Accelerating Photonics Deployment via one Stop Shop Advanced Technology Access for Researchers

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ACTPHAST 4R (Accelerating Photonics Deployment via one Stop Shop Advanced Technology Access for Researchers)

Berichtszeitraum: 2020-07-01 bis 2021-12-31

Europe has been struggling with the conversion of research excellence into industrial success, by successfully bridging conceptual breakthroughs from TRL1-2 to technology demonstrators up to TRL5 which feed the spin-outs, scale-ups and mid-caps of the future, with a strong and sustainable manufacturing base and supply chain ecosystem within Europe. The future of Europe’s regions — and their ability to meet major economic, social, and environmental challenges — will be greatly enhanced if this chasm in the innovation chain can be bridged. This can only happen through research and technology entrepreneurship.
ACTPHAST 4R has been established to provide this exact bridge for the support of accelerated innovation by European researchers in the domain of photonics. Photonics – the technology of light – is a key digital technology with wide-reaching impact, where Europe can accelerate the deployment of next generation products and applications by overcoming the chasm between conceptual breakthrough and advanced technological prototype, with equal relevance to both the high-tech industries as well as for the digitization of more “traditional” sectors. Photonics technologies, in the form of sensors, optical fibres, special lenses, LEDs, photonic integrated circuits and quantum technology amongst many others, will be used to launch all sorts of new and better products in wide-ranging end-user applications. Europe is a global leader in disruptive photonics research, and home to many of the world’s most advanced photonics research institutes and photonics technology platforms. This excellent research base has enabled Europe to establish a strong position in the global photonics market - valued at around 660B€ in 2020 – with an overall market share of 16% (102,5B€).
The critical challenge for Europe therefore is to ensure that it extracts the maximum downstream benefits in terms of new business and job creation from the hundreds of millions of euros already invested upstream in fundamental research in photonics, and in the wonderfully strong base of advanced photonics technologies within Europe’s top research institutes. This can be achieved by opening up access to photonics for all researchers, particularly those from other “non-photonics” scientific domains, thereby unlocking the huge potential for cross-fertilisation of KETs.
ACTPHAST 4R offers wonderful new opportunities to bridge the gap between fundamental research (TRL1-2) and applied research and innovation (TRL4-5). As a result, ACTPHAST 4R expects to achieve its key objectives of:
i) strengthening the European innovation ecosystem, and;
ii) realising improved cross-fertilisation between photonics and other key-enabling technologies

The period covered by this report runs from 1st January 2019 (M1) to 31st December 2021 (M36). For two of those three years, ACTPHAST 4R has been operating against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and as such, Covid-19 has become a hugely prominent part of the story.
At its First Review Meeting with the EC in November 2020, the ACTPHAST 4R coordination team and partners proposed a comprehensive a mitigation plan.
The many positive results achieved up to M36 are outlined below:
• 320.000 estimated readership in total for three press releases each featuring one of the first supported researchers which were mainly taken up by “non-photonics” publications, in addition to the 71.000 estimated readership achieved for the launch press release
• Over 18.000 impressions and 390 engagements on Twitter for specific feature stories on ACTPHAST 4R
• 17.000 visitors to the website
• Launch of a dedicated digital community networking platform for European researchers in June 2021 which had grown to 300 visitors and 52 members by December 2021
• Over 7.200 researchers engaged through 110 targeted outreach campaigns conducted by the ACTPHAST 4R partners all across Europe
• 78 innovation project leads from 20 EU member states, of which the majority (55%) are Postdoc Researchers but with a well-distributed spread of the other leads ranging from very senior research positions of Professor and Assistant/Associate Professor (22%), to less experienced positions of Doctoral Researchers (12%) as well as Junior Scientists, Engineers and other research roles (11%), illustrating the capacity of ACTPHAST 4R to appeal broadly to different members of the European research community while focusing mainly on those researchers with an already strongly developed breakthrough concept and with the ambition and capacity to develop it further towards full valorisation
• 43 researchers engaged with the business coaching via the dedicated online MOOC training
• 33 researchers in receipt of personalised one-to-one technology scouting
• 30 project leaders appointed for preparation of deep innovation project proposals at the evaluation meetings which occur every 2-4 months
• High quality proposals with 92% approval from the evaluation meetings for the proposals submitted
• 24 deep innovation projects granted and contracted for support
• 9 of the photonics technology platforms and domains on offer were involved in the innovation projects to date demonstrating the capacity of ACTPHAST 4R to cover a diverse range of technology support requests from researchers as a one-stop-shop photonics innovation hub.

As such, ACTPHAST 4R is fully on track with so many of the important and ambitious KPI targets for the overall project.

The results achieved in the 36-month period for the 24 supported researchers are very positive in this regard with:
• 83% transnational innovation projects involving 16 European countries
• 66% “non-photonics” researchers demonstrating strong cross-fertilization of photonics with other domains
• Average TRL advancement of 1,5 levels for the innovation projects
• Average duration of 9 months for the innovation projects
• Average R&I leverage factor of 1,7 times from the ACTPHAST 4R funding support
• Very high satisfaction scores provided by the supported researchers, averaging 4 out of 5, across a wide range of support criteria

ACTPHAST 4R is performing very strongly overall in relation to its KPI targets in this area:
• All 24 of the supported researchers aim to develop concrete demonstrators from their innovation projects (100% of the supported researchers versus the target of 80% for this KPI)
• 19 of the 24 researchers with approved innovation projects are intending to pursue joint publications with the ACTPHAST 4R partners involved after the completion of their respective projects (79% of the supported researchers versus the target of 50% for this KPI)
• 16 of the 24 approved innovation projects expect to generate new IP deposits / strengthened patents (67% of the supported researchers versus the target of 30% for this KPI)
• 8 of the 24 researchers with approved innovation projects intend to pursue IP licensing strategies with industry after the completion of their projects (33% of the supported researchers versus the target of 20% for this KPI)
• 12 of the 24 researchers with approved innovation projects intend to establish a spin-out company after the completion of their projects (50% of the supported researchers versus the target of 10% for this KPI)

In addition, 20 European regions are progressively engaged in discussions with the ACTPHAST 4R project coordinator about collaboration on best practice co-funding models for photonics innovation.

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Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ACTPHAST 4R (Accelerating Photonics Deployment via one Stop Shop Advanced Technology Access for Researchers)

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