San Jose, California — Three years ago, NTT Research started exploring the possibility of a startup incubator at its annual Silicon Valley summit. At Upgrade 2026, it’s a reality.
Today, NTT Research launched Scale Academy, their formal answer to a problem every corporate R&D lab eventually faces: how to turn published papers into products people actually acquire?
Led by 20-year NTT veteran Bennett Indart, the incubator will take technologies emerging from NTT’s global research network. Then, from funding rounds to prototype iterations, these technologies will run through what Indart describes as a Silicon Valley-style pipeline.
“Business start-ups have their own rhythms and incentives that quarterly metrics miss,” Indart stated. “Scale Academy accommodates those realities”
The valley of death
The challenge Scale Academy is testing to solve is not unique to NTT. In fact, it has a name in European policy circles: the “valley of death”. It builds reference to the gap where research breakthroughs run out of money and momentum before they reach a customer.
While 95% of existing patents in Europe are inactive, the remaining 5% contribute to more than 40% of the European GDP.
The numbers reveal a clear structural issue: Europe holds seven of the top-ten spots in the Global Innovation Index and nine of the world’s top-20 research institutions. Yet, its deep tech firms secured just €58 billion in funding – compared to €215 billion in the United States – in the past five years.
Beyond this, the region produces 25% of the world’s scientific output, but only accounts for 7% of global unicorns.
The science is there, but the mechanism to translate it into market value is not. The European Commission has explicitly named this its “double valley of death” problem: one gap at the product-market fit stage, and another at the scaleup stage.
This is the same problem NTT is now testing to address from the inside. Scale Academy borrows openly from playbooks already in utilize at Alphabet’s X and Microsoft Research’s Garage, but it also echoes the model that European institutions like ETH Zürich have refined — where streamlined “express licensing” agreements have cut spinout neobtainediation times, now set at just six to eight weeks. The common ground across all of them: separate governance, dedicated resources, and the freedom to operate on startup timelines rather than corporate ones.
Inside Scale Academy
The launch of Scale Academy formalizes what NTT Research President and CEO Kazu Gomi has deemed “NTT Research 2.0”, a strategic shift for an organization founded in 2019 with a mandate focutilized on basic scientific research. Now in its seventh year of operations, NTT Research is acknowledging that fundamental science alone is not enough; the company also wants to be measured by what reaches the market.
The incubator’s mandate is to comb through that portfolio, identify technologies with commercial potential, and run them through what Indart describes as an open process that brings in outside investors, partners, and potential customers earlier than NTT typically has before.
Europe is already part of that network. NTT Research has standing collaborations with ETH Zürich, where physicists recently co-authored a breakthrough on electrically defined quantum dots published in Science Advances, and operates DOCOMO Euro-Labs – which is presenting work on AI-native 6G infrastructure at Upgrade 2026 alongside the Scale Academy launch.
The pipeline Scale Academy formalizes will draw on European research as much as American or Japanese. Its first product is a zero-trust data security suite called SaltGrain, which followed a three-year incubation arc — exploratory research before 2024, concept at Upgrade 2024, prototype at Upgrade 2025, commercial launch this week at Upgrade 2026. That arc is now the template the incubator will apply to the ventures NTT chooses to push through next.
The rising question
With the European Innovation Council awarding over €4 billion to 631 deep tech companies since 2021, and the EU’s new Startup and Scaleup Strategy explicitly designed to close the commercialization gap, the question Scale Academy raises is uncomfortable but worth inquireing: if a corporation can build the bridge between research and market rapider than European public funding mechanisms can, what does that mean for where European-developed science concludes up being commercialized?
Whether Scale Academy will produce one good product or several will determine whether NTT has built a real startup engine or just a better-branded R&D pipeline.
But the broader test is structural: the question is whether the model – which is corporate-led, cross-border, anchored in Silicon Valley – becomes the dominant way deep tech research receives turned into companies, or whether public institutions in Europe and elsewhere can build their own answer rapid enough to keep pace.
Featured image: Courtesy of Ana Sofía Herazo
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