It takes years for a spinoff idea to leave the lab, mature and eventually hit the market, if ever. ATTRACT aims to develop a funding model to help diminish the time needed and increase the chances of great ideas leaving labs and directly benefiting society.
In its first phase, which focused on turning ideas into functional prototypes, ATTRACT supported 170 breakthrough ideas with €100 000 each in seed funding in order to create a proof-of-concept pool of ideas in detection and imaging. The pool includes drones capable of detecting pollution in the air, through to AR/VR aid for surgeons and new cryptographic methods.
During a kick-off meeting on 31 May 2022, ATTRACT presented the 18 R&D&I projects that it had selected from the 68 proposals in the proof-of-concept pool. The 18 projects have received between €500 000 and €2 000 000 each, depending on their start-end technology readiness level (TRL), to help them to move from a prototype to a pre-market product (risk mitigation phase).
About CERN
Founded in 1954, CERN is the European laboratory for particle physics. Sitting astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, it was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 member states. CERN operates a unique range of particle accelerators that enable research into the fundamental particles and laws of the Universe, including the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest scientific instrument on Earth. The 60-year history of CERN is marked with impressive achievements in the construction and operation of powerful linear and circular accelerators. Moreover, CERN offers unique infrastructures for the development of the most sensitive particle detectors in the world, including the four main LHC detectors – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. General-purpose test beam lines provide beams of electrons, muons and hadrons in a very wide energy range for testing the detectors used in the LHC and in its major upgrade, the High-Luminosity LHC, as well as in future colliders and in neutrino experiments.
It takes years for a spinoff idea to leave the lab, mature and eventually hit the market, if ever. ATTRACT aims to develop a funding model to help diminish the time needed and increase the chances of great ideas leaving labs and directly benefiting society. In its first phase, which focused on turning ideas into […]
