Why Deep-Tech Winners Are Built Between the Lab and the Market
India’s innovation challenge is no longer funding discovery. It is building the relay infrastructure that carries technologies across the valley between prototype and deployment.
Ten thousand hours.
That is the scale of project-development expertise required, according to David Yeh of Precursor — a veteran of clean-technology project finance — to make a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project bankable. Permitting. Offtake structuring. Revenue contract design. Lender due diligence. The kind of infrastructure-project experience that takes years to accumulate inside a single team.
FOAK projects often fail not because the technology is weak — but because nobody knows how to turn them into bankable projects.
FOAK projects at Technology Readiness Levels 6 to 8 — where technologies move from pilot validation towards operational and commercial deployment — fail to attract project finance not because the capital is missing. They fail because the project-development capability is missing. Jigar Shah, who led the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, has made the same argument from the government side. The DOE LPO was institutionally designed to fill exactly that gap.
This is the layer of India’s innovation architecture that the ₹1 lakh crore RDI Fund cannot buy directly.
The development
The RDI Fund is moving from design to deployment. The Technology Development Board (TDB) launched its first Open Call on 4 February 2026. Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) plays the equivalent role for biotechnology. The architecture I described in the previous post in this series — patient capital, two-level fund management, coordinated public-private financing — is now being tested in real time.
But India is not entering this race first. The United States is years ahead in AI infrastructure. China dominates batteries, solar, and increasingly biotechnology. The European Union has set the global pace on clean-industrial regulation, even as its EV industry confronts strategic disorientation. The question for India is no longer whether to fund deep tech. It is how to enter a race that has already started.
The surface implication
The instinctive reading is that India needs to catch up — meaning sprint harder. Catching up implies a sprint. Sprint thinking produces capital-rich, project-poor outcomes. Northvolt’s collapse, despite billions in backing, is a reminder that capital alone does not solve industrial execution risk.
As Enzo Baglieri and I argued in a recent piece for SDA Bocconi, technology transitions historically resemble relay races more than individual runs. Competitive advantage comes from the synchronised handover of the baton, not from isolated acceleration.
The Asian playbook makes the point. Hyundai Motor Group, without grand declarations, has steadily expanded its capabilities in complementary domains. In 2021, the group acquired over 80 percent of Boston Dynamics for more than one billion dollars — positioning itself for collaborative and humanoid robotics over a decade-long horizon. The point was not robotics alone. It was capability positioning across technological futures.
How many Indian deep-tech bets are being placed on similar horizons?
The strategic question
A relay only works if the handoff infrastructure exists. This is where India’s gap is structural — and where the RDI Fund, on its own, will not close it.
Three layers of relay infrastructure remain missing.
Technology roadmapping at scale. A technology roadmap done well is not a static document — it is a dynamic coordination mechanism, aligning capital allocation, regulatory signals, R&D priorities, and cross-border partnerships across time horizons. India has sectoral missions — green hydrogen, semiconductors, quantum, climate technology — but very few institutional roadmaps that connect research, project development, and commercialisation in a single planning horizon. This is what Mariana Mazzucato’s mission-oriented innovation policy framework describes as directionality. India has set directions. It has not yet drawn the roadmaps.
Boundary-spanning intermediaries. These are the actors that broker between technology developers, end-users, regulators, and financiers — what Anna Bergek and colleagues describe as the connective tissue of a Technology Innovation System. They reduce transaction costs. They align stakeholders. They carry projects across the long valley between lab and market. India has no shortage of incubators and accelerators. What it lacks are intermediaries built for capital intensive, long-cycle deep tech.
FOAK project execution capability. This is where the 10,000-hour problem becomes most visible. The expertise that determines bankability — permitting, offtake, revenue contract design, lender due diligence — has not yet accumulated inside India’s deep-tech ventures or its public investment institutions. The US built the DOE LPO to fill exactly this gap. The EU is building it through institutions like the European Investment Bank’s project advisory hubs. India has not yet built its equivalent.
Europe’s challenge, as the longer Bocconi piece put it, is not invention but execution. The same diagnosis applies to India.
Watching from Australia
Australia is not winning the deep-tech race either. But it is investing deliberately in relay infrastructure — project-development capability, sector studios, bilateral tech-transfer programs. The DJI backed drone hub at the Food Innovation Precinct Western Australia, PropaGATE powered by Beanstalk’s Drought Venture Studio and Grower Group Alliance, and the Australia-India RISE program are not large-scale interventions. They are deliberate experiments in how the relay handoff happens. The lesson for India is not the scale of Australia’s effort. It is the deliberateness of design.
The countries that master FOAK execution capability will not just commercialise technology faster. They will capture the financing, standards, supply chains, and geopolitical leverage that follow.
The closing test
By the end of 2028, the test will be visible.
Will India have sprinted and stumbled — well-funded research projects that did not cross the FOAK line? Or will it have relayed and led — a smaller number of globally competitive deep-tech firms built on coordinated roadmaps, intermediated handoffs, and properly resourced project-development capability?
The architecture will not answer this question. Roadmaps, intermediaries, and project developers will.
The next post in this series turns to where India’s relay infrastructure is most visibly being tested — and most visibly missing the point. Intermediaries.
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Dr Chris Vas writes TheMissingMiddleIQ from Western Australia. Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Canterbury. Notes from the messy middle between policy ambition and commercial reality.