The CEA and its ecosystem
From research to industry
As a leading player in the field of innovation, the CEA leverages the technologies it develops in key sectors such as energy, health and digital transformation to support competitiveness, job creation and, more broadly, France's industrial sovereignty.
In 2020, the CEA had more than 700 ongoing or new partnerships with manufacturers of all sizes, from start-ups and SMEs to major corporations.
This is one of the CEA’s key missions. Since its creation, the organisation has striven to protect the results of its in-house research and technologies and leverage them in the manufacturing industry to benefit society as a whole. The CEA has been accelerating, intensifying and shaping this approach for the past thirty years, relying on an active patent registration and transfer policy by licensing to industry.
It is now the leading organisation in terms of patent registrations in France and Europe, with a portfolio of over 7,200 active patent families. These patents relate to energy, health and digital technologies (microelectronics and instrumentation) predominantly, covering the three major transitions - energy, digital and healthcare - currently under way. This approach offers partner companies an innovative and secure research framework.
The CEA relies on three main pillars to help foster this technology transfer and stay tuned to the needs expressed:
- • A culture of innovation shared by all staff
- • State-of-the-art technological research combined with more fundamental research, supported by platforms that are unique in France if not in Europe, covering the entire value chains from R&D to prototyping
- • A multi-disciplinary organisation offering a wealth of technology transfer expertise
In 2020, the CEA had more than 700 ongoing or new partnerships with manufacturers of all sizes, from start-ups and SMEs to major corporations.
Operation start-up!
Acting on the firm belief that deep tech start-ups are not only a key link in the technology transfer chain but also important economic contributors to industrial growth, the CEA has been setting up and building start-ups around its own technologies for more than 20 years. The goal: to accelerate innovation and cultivate new industries. The start-ups created can raise equity investment from CEA Investissement, a wholly owned subsidiary of the CEA, advised and run by its capital investment partner, Supernova Invest.
The Magellan programme, launched by the CEA in June 2020, aims to increase the number of initiatives and double the number of spin-off start-ups created every year over the next five years. This scheme, which includes a technology maturation programme (Magellan-Lab) and an incubation programme (Magellan-Tremplin (Springboard)), is designed to encourage and support the CEA’s external collaborators and new idea contributors deploying CEA technologies in their start-up projects. Successful candidates benefit from support at all stages of their project, from entrepreneurship training to idea maturation and project incubation. After the first call for ideas (and despite the restrictions imposed by the pandemic), some twenty projects were selected in 2020 out of more than 70 proposals submitted.
The CEA’s start-ups continued to grow in 2020 with some major announcements and significant funding rounds, including ALEDIA (80 million euros) and MICROOLED (8 million euros), which is testament to their innovation capability.