Too many promising research results never reach the market. The technology works, the need is real, but the path from lab to commercial application collapses somewhere in between. This gap, widely known as the “valley of death”, is one of the most persistent structural failures in European innovation ecosystems.
It is not a lack of ideas that kills innovation at this stage, but a lack of structured bridges: between academic knowledge and industrial know-how, between a proof of concept and an investable proposition, between researchers and the business networks that could take their work further.
BEAGLE was designed to build those bridges. The project actively matches companies and researchers around shared market opportunities and supports the duos through a structured co-creation process, from identifying untapped market niches to building investment-ready proposals for disruptive technologies.
The underlying logic is simple: a company and a research team that are properly matched, working on a real market need, and supported through the process are far more likely to make it across the valley of death than either would on their own.
NextMove’s contribution: expertise embedded where it matters
NextMove, the French automotive and mobility cluster and one of BEAGLE’s nine consortium partners, contributes by embedding its technical and business expertise directly into the project’s evaluation process.
NextMove experts assess proposals submitted through BEAGLE’s open calls to identify the researcher-company duos with the strongest potential for collaboration.
Beyond its evaluator role, NextMove will mobilise its network of technical and legal experts to accompany the most promising researcher-company duos as they move toward concrete collaboration and European funding. This means helping them structure their partnership, particularly on intellectual property matters, identifying the right funding instruments, and providing hands-on support to build competitive applications.
Author: Solene Marek (NextMove)