Europe outpaces the United States in startup creation, but falls far short in the capital needed to bring those startups to market. According to the European Commission, Europe generated an average of 15,200 new tech startups per year between 2018 and 2023, compared to 13,700 in the US. Yet in 2024, venture capital available in the EU was between 80% and 84% lower than in the US across every growth stage. The European Investment Fund found that only 14% of European fund managers consider the ecosystem’s risk appetite strong at pre-seed and Series A stage, against 66% in the US. In Italy, the gap is even starker: according to the Bank of Italy, venture capital investment averaged just 0.03% of GDP between 2021 and 2023 — a third of the level in France and Germany, and only a fifth in absolute value.
A new feature on Industria Italiana explores this gap and the role NSBProject plays in closing it, not by adding more capital to the system, but by making risk visible, measurable, and manageable for the investors who allocate it.
It’s not just about the money
The core issue investors face isn’t a shortage of promising technology — it’s uncertainty. Which risks has a project already resolved? Which remain open? And how much capital is actually needed to close the gap? A strong prototype and solid scientific results aren’t enough on their own: a project can be years away from market readiness simply because it lacks a business model, the right team competencies, a regulatory strategy, or a defined path to customers.
To measure that distance, NSBProject developed a dedicated methodology for research-based innovation, university spin-offs and deep-tech startups — tested over more than two years on over 30 technologies, largely in digital health and health tech, including projects funded by the European Union.
Six independent dimensions of readiness
Rather than producing a single score, NSBProject’s Startup Readiness check-up evaluates six independent indicators:
- Technology Readiness Level (TRL) — the maturity of the underlying technology
- Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) — production, industrialization and operational capability
- Integration Readiness Level (IRL) — internal and external system integration
- Commercial Readiness Level (CRL) — market, business model, customers and value chain
- Team Readiness Level (TmRL) — skills, roles and organizational capacity
- Legal Readiness Level (LRL) — intellectual property, privacy, contracts, compliance and regulation
These six indicators feed into a single aggregate score, the Solution Readiness Level. Crucially, the model — refined through the input of more than 20 technology-transfer specialists — weighs critical gaps more heavily than strong ones, so that strong technical maturity can’t mask serious weaknesses on the commercial, organizational or regulatory side.
The methodology is already undergoing scientific validation with Flanders Make, one of Europe’s leading technology transfer hubs in Belgium, a long-standing partner of NSBProject with over 5 affiliated universities and 2,000 associated companies.
“Investors don’t avoid risk itself — they avoid risk they can’t understand”
As Andrea Jester, co-founder of NSBProject and head of international development, explains in the article:
“One of the most common mistakes is to consider a technology ready simply because the prototype works. In reality, many research-born initiatives stall not because of scientific limitations, but because the customer, the business model, the regulatory pathway, data ownership, or the market-entry skills haven’t yet been defined.”
Jester points out that the issue is now recognized at institutional level: in its 2026 consultation on the reform of venture and growth capital funds, the European Commission listed the complexity of early-stage due diligence — and investor aversion toward sectors or technologies exposed to real or perceived regulatory and cycle-related risk — among the key barriers, with biotech and health tech explicitly flagged as strategic but higher-risk sectors.
“Investors don’t avoid risk in itself: they avoid risk they cannot understand, compare and govern. Our goal is to make these imbalances visible before they translate into delays, costs, or investment in the wrong direction.”
Beyond a score: an operational roadmap
The Startup Readiness check-up doesn’t stop at rating each dimension. For every project, it identifies:
- what has already been achieved
- the gaps that remain
- the risks that could block adoption
- the most urgent actions to address
- the most effective sequence of activities
- the skills and partners needed to move forward
The assessment also factors in elements external to the startup itself — market maturity, access to capital, value chain structure, integration capacity, and the presence of established procurement mechanisms. The output can be very concrete: validate demand before approaching investors, clarify IP ownership before entering an industrial partnership, or complete the regulatory pathway before pursuing commercialization.
Startups, university spin-offs and new technology ventures can request a free or tailored assessment through NSBProject’s official website.
Why digital health is a natural fit
Digital healthcare is one of the areas where a multidimensional assessment matters most. To reach the market, a health technology has to combine technical development, clinical evidence, data governance and protection, interoperability, a regulatory pathway, hospital access, economic sustainability, and the ability to engage buyers and industrial partners — all at once.
NSBProject’s roadmap connects each identified gap to the right partner for closing it: Living Labs for real-world validation, testing and certification bodies, European Digital Innovation Hubs, clusters, hospitals, OEMs, investors and European networks.
“In digital health, the sequence of decisions matters as much as the decisions themselves,” Jester adds. “Approaching an investor before demand has been validated, or starting certification before the product has stabilized, can generate real costs and delays. The check-up helps identify not just what’s missing, but what needs to happen first.”
Case study: when the technology is more mature than the company
The article details a real-world application of the methodology with a Greek university spin-off developing an AI solution for capsule endoscopy image analysis. The assessment confirmed a strong technological and clinical core — the solution shows a distinctive advantage in reducing false positives per exam compared to CNN-based approaches, with the potential to meaningfully reduce alert fatigue among clinicians.
But the check-up also revealed a clear imbalance: strong integration capability paired with low commercial maturity and an unformalized legal and regulatory pathway. The assessment pinpointed the specific blocking factors — an undefined business model and value chain, unvalidated demand among hospitals and industrial partners, an incomplete MDR pathway for the software-as-a-medical-device, unresolved dataset ownership, and gaps in the team’s commercial and regulatory expertise.
Following the assessment, NSBProject worked with the company’s management to identify the four most promising market niches, developing dedicated pilots and business plans for each — giving both management and investors a clearer, evidence-based basis for decision-making.
The case illustrates what the Startup Readiness model is really built to do: not simply confirm that a technology works, but measure how ready the entire initiative is to become a market-adoptable product — and turn every identified gap into an ordered development roadmap.