Dr Nicos Rossides
Dr Michael Papadopoulos
Dr Fabio Maria Montagnino
The Cyprus Institute (www.cyi.ac.cy) has recently started to reap the benefits of a long and continuous “journey” which started about four years ago, aiming to identify, assess and steer innovative research results towards commercialization. The process has not been an easy one and involved considerable awareness building and training of our academic and researcher communities in the “language” of entrepreneurship, as well as creating the right incentives for researchers to devote some of their time towards activities which are usually outside their “comfort zone”. It also involved internal restructuring, including the orientation of the research support function towards “Innovation” which was supported by the establishment of the “Research and Innovation Management and Support Office” and the subsequent creation of the “Innovation & Entrepreneurship Office” that acts a vital hub for all innovation and entrepreneurship efforts.
A separate independent entity (CREFL Business Ventures) was also established to coordinate the various spin-off companies and to facilitate their initial development by providing a series of supporting services. During the process, CyI had initially tapped into the extensive expertise of Oxford University’s Oxentia in terms of best practices and toolkits for use in translating research to innovation.
To date, the Cyprus Institute and CREFL Business Ventures are supporting seven new ventures in areas that are vitally important not just commercially but in terms of social impact, sustainability and environmental protection. The developed technologies rely heavily on the multi-disciplinary nature of the Cyprus Institute and combine unique expertise from scientific domains which at first sight may seem to have few or no commonalities. This cross-fertilisation of ideas and expertise, when taking place in an innovation-oriented ecosystem, produce unique results based on exclusive Intellectual Property with high commercialisation potential.
The activities, aiming to reach market-ready status within the next year, are drawing on already secured financial support operated under national public and private initiatives. These include:
- Geospatial AI Analytics for fast and accurate risk monitoring and assessment, to be used in the real estate and insurance market.
- Infrared tomographic medical imaging system, to replace the 2D planar thermography in a number of applications to provide 3D visualizations of internal body structures.
- Nature-inspired adaptive building envelope, for improved energy efficiency.
- 100% biobased self-healing anticorrosive coatings, for protection of metallic structures.
- Nanomaterial Synthesis Platform, producing nanoparticles of well-defined size at a fraction of the cost compared to existing solutions.
- Art Characterization Service, as a non-destructive integrated pipeline for artwork analysis.
- HPC enabled Medical Image Reconstruction, able to produce high contrast images from PET and SPECT data.
The journey so far at The Cyprus Institute demonstrates that with methodical planning and ongoing institutional support, innovation and entrepreneurship can indeed prosper and thrive in Cyprus.
