EOcafe: ESA InCubed, Investing in Industrial Innovation

The European Space Agency’s InCubed programme stands for ‘Investing in Industrial Innovation’ and is a Public Private Partnership co-funding programme run by the ESA Φ-lab. InCubed is an open call programme supporting innovative and commercially viable products and services using satellite imagery and datasets, with a focus on removing entry barriers to the commercial marketplace. The programme has a very wide scope and can be used to co-fund anything from building satellites to ground applications and everything in between, or to develop new EO business models.

The ESA Φ-lab creates or discovers new transformational ideas, selects and nurtures the good ones, develops the “solution” by testing and maturing them, and with the InCubed programme invests in the best ones to reach market adoption. Running since July 2018, it has supported many startups, small and medium-sized enterprises and large companies bring their Earth observation solutions to market and provide technological advances and tangible societal benefits. The InCubed programme is an integral part of the ESA Φ-lab, where it represents the last step of the innovation pipeline.

The InCubed programme runs as a permanent open call, as well as specific “national calls” that run every year which are organised in cooperation with its participating Member States, in order to boost EO innovation and investment in specific countries. A number of initiatives have benefited from awards under InCubed and we shall hear about two such success stories and how the programme concretely supported their business.

Our host Geoff Sawyer (EARSC Strategic Advisor and former Secretary General) will be joined by Jose Manuel Delgado Blasco (Commercial EO System Support Engineer at Φ-lab Invest Office), David Kolitzus (Head of Department – Agriculture, GeoVille) and Florian Patzwahl (Lead Systems Engineer, OroraTech). Together, they will explore how the InCubed programme can support industrial innovation in the EO sector and how companies can benefit from it.