Bridging Institutional Fragmentation: Designing a Coordinated Support Infrastructure for Deep-Tech Scale-Up in Europe

Abstract

Deep technology ventures are widely recognized as critical drivers of industrial transformation and sustainability transitions. Yet their progression from laboratory validation (TRL 4-5) to pilot and demonstration scale (TRL 6-7) remains structurally constrained within fragmented European innovation systems. While substantial public funding instruments and research infrastructures exist, deep-tech startups continue to face persistent coordination failures in accessing capital, pilot facilities, and industrial validation environments. Drawing on exploratory qualitative insight from an in-depth interview with an experienced startup mentor within an EIT HEI project, this study identifies recurring systemic bottlenecks in the TRL 4-7 transition. These include limited visibility and accessibility of mid-scale pilot infrastructures, fragmented and poorly sequenced funding architectures, and misalignment between blended finance instruments and long development cycles. Anchored in entrepreneurial ecosystem theory, regional innovation systems literature, and the “valley of death” framework, the paper combines this empirical diagnosis with a structured desk analysis of European support mechanisms, including the European Innovation Council (EIC), EIT Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs), Horizon Europe, Eurostars, InvestEU, and Research and Technology Organisation (RTO) networks. The analysis demonstrates that Europe’s deep-tech scale-up gap reflects not an absence of support, but insufficient institutional integration and orchestration across funding and infrastructure domains. In response, the study advances a design-oriented framework for coordinated support infrastructure within EIT HEI ecosystems. The proposed model conceptualizes EIT HEI as a systemic intermediary performing three functions: (1) venture-stage diagnostic alignment, (2) infrastructure and blended finance brokerage, and (3) cross-institutional ecosystem orchestration. By integrating dispersed opportunity structures into a coherent navigation architecture, the framework aims to reduce transaction costs and improve pathway continuity for research-intensive ventures. The paper contributes to ongoing debates on Europe’s deep-tech scale-up challenge by reframing fragmentation as a coordination problem and proposing institutional design principles for enhancing systemic alignment within innovation ecosystems.