SmartPilots Factsheets and Customer Survey Financial Instruments for Shared Pilots Facilities (SPF) in the Bioeconomy

As Shared Pilot Facilities for the Key Enabling Technology ‘Industrial Biotechnology’ speed up sustainable innovation, they are a crucial element in dealing with societal challenges such as developing a sustainable, innovative and knowledge-based economy in Europe, creating jobs and meeting climate targets.
Shared Pilot Facilities are open access research and demonstration facilities investing in a broad spectrum of state-of-the-art equipment and offering required expertise with the aim to help innovative companies scale-up their successful research to an actual industrial innovation (= Technology Readiness Level – TRL increase). Collaboration, in an early stage of innovation, with open access shared pilot facilities maintaining a high level of innovation capability, substantially lowers the financial risk for the innovating company and speeds up the commercialization of their new product or process. The long lead time associated with commercialization of novel industrial biotechnology processes causes many companies to fail. Shared Pilot Facilities help companies to bridge this ‘valley of death’ by reducing time, cost and risk substantially when scaling up innovations from lab scale to industrial scale.
Furthermore, Europe recognizes too much R&D is deployed outside of Europe. Funds for support of the demonstration phase of promising innovations in the field of industrial biotechnology / bio-economy, are available, but companies find it difficult to access these funds. Shared Pilot Facilities can help companies to access these funds.