From the Valley of Death to a Real-World Impact

Are you familiar with the term "innovation valley of death"? It is the point where promising research fails to reach adoption. The same phenomenon can be observed in Europe's High Performance Computing (HPC) ecosystem, including its Centers of Excellence (CoEs). They produce world-class science and software, yet many valuable results remain underused once a project ends.

Six European HPC Centers of Excellence have now published a practical framework to turn research results into real-world impact.

These CoEs produce world-class science and software, yet many valuable results remain underused once a project ends, right at the "valley of death". To help address this challenge, a task force of professionals from six CoEs has published "Managing Exploitable Results in HPC Centers of Excellence: from Identification to Impact - Part 1: Key Exploitable Results", the first of four white papers on how to manage research results for maximum impact. It follows the task force's 2025 white paper on building commercialization capabilities in CoEs.

The central idea of the 16-page paper is that not every technically successful result should become a Key Exploitable Result (KER). Candidates should be identified early and screened against a minimum evidence checklist covering, among other aspects, target users, value proposition, alternatives and ownership. In practice, the paper proposes a KER pipeline with five stages (Candidate, Screened, Selected, Pilot-ready and Adoption-ready) separated by documented decision gates. It also categorizes the KERs typical of HPC CoEs, from software and workflows to data assets, services and training products, and introduces a multidimensional readiness model (technology, market, investment and societal) that the next parts of the series will develop.

This paper is aimed at CoE researchers and developers, project coordinators and innovation managers, as well as anyone taking part in Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Actions with exploitable digital results. The white paper is a collaborative effort by researchers, exploitation and innovation managers, and communication officers from six HPC CoEs – BioExcel, HiDALGO2, EXCELLERAT P2, MultiXscale, ESiWACE and ChEESE-2P – all members of the "Sustainability Vision for CoEs Taskforce", set up within CASTIEL-2.