Beyond Hubs and Desks: Governing Deep Tech for Success

Professor Ali Abbas

This challenge isn’t unique to Australia – it’s a global reality that universities and ecosystems everywhere are grappling with. On a recent trip through the Middle East, I saw both the enthusiasm for innovation and the efforts to inject more structure into it.

The UAE is pouring resources into research institutes and startup hubs as it seeks to build a knowledge economy beyond oil. Oman, likewise, is fostering an entrepreneurial ecosystem and learning from others’ mistakes. Just last month, Oman’s SME development authority launched a nationwide program to upgrade incubators – including those within universities – so that they deliver “structured support and incubation services” rather than just office space.

Under this initiative, any licensed incubator must provide a detailed program of support (mentoring in finance, marketing, legal, training workshops, etc.) and show the added value they’ll give to startups. In other words, even abroad they recognise that empty desks and hopeful entrepreneurs aren’t enough – real innovation outcomes require structured processes, skilled guidance and alignment with market needs.

Back in Australia, it’s clear we must continue evolving our approach in the same vein. The good news is that models are emerging to meet this need.

I’m proud that at Scimita we’ve developed a Deep Tech Innovation House model explicitly to bridge this gap – living right in that valley of death and building a pathway out.

Scimita was born from firsthand frustration with the old way of doing things: as Dr. Nomvar recounts, when his university supervisor told him “university is not built for [commercialisation]”, he left academia, and I’ve been proud to partner with him to create an organisation that is “ambitious, bold, rigorous, methodical and commercial, to take research out of people’s minds and put it in the market” .

That ethos underpins our Innovation Governance approach. We’ve synchronized the technical, commercial and even environmental dimensions of innovation into one governance framework, complete with tools and processes to steer projects at every step.

A golden rule is ensuring the Commercial Readiness Level stays at least equal to (or one step ahead of) the Technical Readiness Level throughout development. In practice, this means clear-eyed go/no-go gates, techno-economic analyses, market validation, and risk mitigation are built into the R&D journey – not tacked on at the end. It’s about providing the guardrails to de-risk innovation while still moving fast.

This “engineering of innovation” is yielding results. The Deep Tech House model we’ve crafted is built on lessons learned from dozens of projects (the roses and bones of over 60 innovation projects we’ve helped shape). By rigorously syncing technology development (TRL) with real commercial strategy (CRL) – and even gauging Environmental Readiness (ERL) for sustainability – we give deep tech startups a governed runway to scale up. You can see it in action with projects like Pectin 360, which leveraged Scimita’s techno-economic analysis to prove its business case, or university spin-outs in hydrogen and medical devices that we’ve guided from concept to Series A. Each success chips away at the old notion that Australia “comes up with stuff but can’t commercialise it.”

Innovation is a contact sport – it requires getting research out of the comfort zone and into the fray of markets, investors and real-world feedback. The past month’s developments show that the pace of innovation is as high as ever. Now, the focus is firmly on acceleration with alignment: speeding up the journey from lab to market, but with the right governance so that breakthroughs don’t derail along the way. With universities instituting new programs and partners like us refining the methodology, we’re inching closer to cracking the innovation-commercialisation code. The momentum is here, and if we continue to pair our bright ideas with robust execution frameworks, Australia’s next global success stories are sure to emerge – not by accident, but by design.

-Professor Ali Abbas