Cyprus Seeds has steadily become an important player in Cyprus’s research and innovation ecosystem. Since 2018, under the leadership of Managing Director Maria Georgiadou, the nonprofit organization has worked to bridge the gap between academic research and market application, supporting over two dozen teams, enabling spinouts, and facilitating patent filings. Now, Cyprus Seeds is entering a new phase through its partnership with UK-based Conception X—Europe’s leading venture program for PhD deeptech founders.

Speaking to FastForward, Georgiadou explains how the collaboration is expected to enhance the entrepreneurial capacity of Cypriot research teams, why public R&D investment remains a critical priority, and how cultural change is key to tackling the brain drain.

I was really excited to find out that, around the time Cyprus Seeds was born, a very similar initiative was being launched in the UK with the same vision and mission! Conception X was introduced to me by the founders of 33East, Cyprus’ first equity fund for start-ups, one year ago.

In the short term, Cyprus Seeds teams will benefit from the wealth of knowledge and advice that Conception X provides in trainings focused on various steps of the research commercialization process. I think that our teams also feel supported by their counterparts from the top universities in the UK, Ireland, Italy, and Portugal, who are also participating. Further on in the process, our teams will also be able to take advantage of various networking events to connect with investors in the UK which is a larger and more sophisticated market than that of Cyprus. In the long term, we hope to leverage our partnership with Conception X as a model to encourage more PhDs and academics to bring their unique research into the world through the marketplace. Alongside our new initiative to build a more robust mentoring network in partnership with MIT’s Venture Mentoring Services (VMS), it will help our program in our aim to best support our projects in each cycle, and ultimately, to shift the culture in academic institutions here in Cyprus.

Cyprus Seeds 4th cohort is already reaping the benefits of our partnership with Conception X. On a weekly basis, our teams have been joining training sessions, organised by Conception X, on effective strategies to successfully achieve research commercialization. The training equips research-based teams with the skills to identify real market needs, define their value proposition, and build deep-tech ventures. It combines intensive virtual and in-person sessions on customer discovery, pitching, investment readiness, and strategic IP management. These workshops have proven to be an invaluable addition to Cyprus Seeds’ well-established program.

Given the complexity of our teams’ scientific research, Cyprus Seeds mentorship tends to focus on the more technical components of the market commercialisation, like how to convert their research into market-ready prototypes and products. We hope that the addition of these training sessions with Conception X will act as another, more entrepreneurial-focused voice of guidance. Where their mentorship helps them develop their research/product prototypes, their training sessions with Conception X will develop their entrepreneurial mindset. Conception X training sessions complement the pre-existing offerings of Cyprus Seeds and further supports our teams in their research commercialization process.

While Cyprus Seeds as an organization has been successful because of its hard work, strategic partnerships, and broad network, it has fundamentally been successful because it first recognized the groundbreaking, valuable research taking place at our renowned institutions of higher learning. Our founders ---myself included--- all saw the enormous potential in the scientific research in Cyprus and the good it could bring to Cyprus and the world through the marketplace. So, we owe a great deal of our success to recognizing what was missing in Cyprus: research commercialization.

At the same time, our strategic partnerships with universities and organizations specializing in this space from abroad have proven critical as an inspiration for the structure of our program. We initially constructed the program in the model of MIT’s Deshpande Centre, which similarly grants both funding and mentorship to professors, senior researchers, and PhD candidates interested in bringing their research to the market. Three years ago, we partnered up with EGG, the most successful accelerator for start-ups in Greece. More recently, we partnered with Conception X in the UK, and, soon, with MIT’s Venture Mentoring Services (VMS) in order to enrich Cyprus Seeds' offerings. We believe that strategic partnerships are critical to our evolution as an organization, and essential in our efforts to best support Cyprus’ innovation ecosystem.

While we applaud the incredible R&D support by the government so far in innovation, the innovation ecosystem in Cyprus desperately needs more spending if it is to maintain and grow its reputation as a premier start-up hub in Europe for research commercialization. In line with what has been outlined in broad strokes in the Vision for 2035, the government needs to invest significantly more in R&D in order to catch up to the EU average and to attract further private R&D investment. With more R&D investment by the government, I have reason to hope that Cyprus’ innovation sector will grow exponentially. According to the 2024 data, Cyprus’s Summary Innovation Index is performing just above the EU average (106.3%) and Cyprus’ innovation performance is growing 10% faster than the EU average. Despite falling behind in R&D spending, the fact that Cyprus is still performing above average suggests that it has enormous growth potential in its innovation sector if there is more R&D investment by the government.

While I am optimistic about an eventual reversal of the brain drain in Cyprus, I believe there’s still a lot of work to be done in order to shift this paradigm. More broadly, Cyprus needs to continue to take steps towards achieving “Vision 2035”, a process that I hope will make Cyprus attractive enough to both retain young talent and potentially even attract members of Cypriot diaspora to return to Cyprus.

In the innovation sector, I am already seeing incredibly talented individuals seizing new career opportunities and choosing to stay in Cyprus. I continue to be amazed by the level of research being produced at our universities. But, as we at Cyprus Seeds know well, it takes a lot of work to steadily shift culture, especially in our endeavour to support the market commercialization process in Cypriot universities. I do hope that we are playing a part in the process to support and empower young researchers to bring their innovative research ideas to the market, and, in doing so, to find reason and purpose in staying in Cyprus.

What: Cyprus Seeds

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Who: Maria Georgiadou has been the Managing Director of Cyprus Seeds for the last 6 years. Before launching Cyprus Seeds in 2018, Maria designed the Program of Cyprus Seeds in collaboration with the MIT Centre for Technology and Innovation and the University of Cyprus. In her capacity as a Manager Director of Cyprus Seeds, she has attracted more than €1,3 in the form of donations from the Greeks of the Diaspora in the US, private corporations and individuals from Cyprus and Europe, and the Cyprus Government, for the support of scientific innovative projects. Prior to Cyprus Seeds, Maria was a full-time consultant, for 3 years, with the Bank of Cyprus, on matters related to innovation and EU funding. During her time at the Bank of Cyprus, she initiated and coordinated IDEA, the first Accelerator-Incubator in Cyprus for start-ups. Maria has 25 years of experience with the Cyprus Development Bank where she was Head, for 8 years, of the International Banking Unit. At CDB bank, she also set up the EU Unit and attracted EU grants for SMEs in Cyprus. During her last 3 years at the Bank, she was Head of Business Development & Marketing. Maria worked at the European Commission in Brussels. For 3 years, she was an evaluator for the HORIZON 2020 SME Instrument, which funded the commercialisation of innovative research projects in Europe. For 12 years, she was one of the two partners of the World Economic Forum in Cyprus, contributing to the annual Global Competitiveness Report of the WEF. Maria studied in the US with a Fulbright scholarship and got her Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Oxford, UK.