Abstract

The mission of the TETRACOM Coordination Action is to boost European academia-to-industry technology transfer (TT) in all domains of Computing Systems. While many other European and national initiatives focus on training of entrepreneurs and support for start-up companies, the key differentiator of TETRACOM is a novel instrument called Technology Transfer Project (TTP). TTPs help to lower the barrier for researchers to make the first steps towards commercialisation of their research results. TTPs are designed to provide incentives for TT at small to medium scale via partial funding of dedicated, well-defined, and short term academia-industry collaborations that bring concrete R&D results into industrial use. This will be implemented via competitive Expressions-of-Interest (EoI) calls for TTPs, whose coordination, prioritization, evaluation, and management are the major actions of TETRACOM. It is expected to fund up to 50 TTPs. The TTP activities will be complemented by Technology Transfer Infrastructures (TTIs) that provide training, service, and dissemination actions. These are designed to encourage a larger fraction of the R&D community to engage in TTPs, possibly even for the first time. Altogether, TETRACOM is conceived as the major pilot project of its kind in the area of Computing Systems, acting as a TT catalyst for the mutual benefit of academia and industry. The project´s primary success metrics are the number and value of coordinated TTPs as well as the amount of newly introduced European TT actors. It is expected to acquire around more than 20 new contractors over the project duration. TETRACOM complements and actually precedes the use of existing financial instruments such as venture capital or business angels based funding.