I have been building out a series of IIBE Framework papers looking at how the European Union through its European Innovation Council (EIC), a major EU initiative supporting deep-tech startups and research, can move its new scaling mandate underpinned by deploying a recently announced Euro 5 Billion fund.
The EIC is the right institution for this. Not because it is the only EU institution with a scaling mandate, but because it is the only institution that already operates above the national interest level, already has portfolio-level visibility across node types, and is already at the moment — the first Scaleup Europe Fund investment tranche — when integrating this governance architecture is most effective. The extension of EIC’s remit from financing scale to governing the ecosystem conditions for scale is not a departure from its mandate. It is the logical completion of it.
I worked through four documents looking at a combination of ideas that look to challenge political geography and optimize functional architecture. We should look for imaginative ways for true ecosystems of capital, intelligence, connections and resources can flow freely to the points where that expertise is the strongest across Europe. We need to think beyond boundaries into optimized performance. Can we think differently across Europe when it comes to innovation, make our institutional flows stronger?
My first document looked at a different way to overcome the existing country or entity (allocation and rigidity issue) for a higher level of optimizing the system. Not who gets allocated at country level the central funds. As the EU has a default unit of analysis on country they inhibit how ecosystems can generate and compound value.
The right unit is the node, a structured unit defined by its function. Where a country asks “what do we produce?”, a node asks “what structural function do we perform, and for whom?” The EU-27 as a Node System has real merit to explore. This paper argues that the European ecosystem’s scaling challenge is not primarily a funding challenge. It is a governance architecture challenge. The node map of Western Europe reveals an ecosystem with extraordinary latent capability. The concept of nodes as the architecture for Ecosystem across Europe offers European sovereign advantage.
What Europe has not built is the node architecture that converts those positions into compounding systemic advantage. The control points generate revenue and geopolitical relevance. They do not generate the self-reinforcing cycle of intelligence flow, governance adaptation, and systemic advantage that defines a genuinely intelligent integrated ecosystem. My second document deals with control points.
My second document was looking at genuine control points, those positions of structural irreplaceability in global technology and value chains. The issue is compounding. Control points are a specific position in a technology stack, standards architecture or infrastructure layer at which a single actor holds a capability that the rest of the system requires and cannot replicate easily or bypass. ASML is a good example. They are irreplaceable and offer system dependency. Europe holds irreplaceable leverage here and it is looking at these control points as greater compounding ones. These can scale faster and hold European sovereignty.
The control point generates revenue and employment but does not compound into broader systemic advantage, because the node architecture that would allow it to do so is absent. The control point is an isolated asset, not a system-level lever.This is the dominant European failure mode — and it is directly visible in the EIC’s existing portfolio.
Europe has invested — sometimes deliberately, often accidentally — in acquiring control points of genuine structural significance. ASML, Ericsson/Nokia, SAP, imec, Airbus, and the Brussels Effect regulatory architecture are not minor competitive advantages. They are positions of irreplaceable leverage in global value chains that the rest of the world’s technology system depends on.
My third document is shifting thinking from Capital Scale to Ecosystem Scale and the governance architecture for the EIC Scaleup Europe mandate. This looks at different scaling ambitions and their structural limits.The EIC’s 2026 trajectory is clear and significant. The Scaleup Europe Fund — with EQT appointed as fund manager and €2.5 billion already committed from the EIC and private LPs including Novo Holdings, Allianz, APG, and the Wallenberg family — represents Europe’s most concrete attempt to prevent foreign capital from acquiring its best technology before it scales. That ambition is correct. But the architecture does not yet match it.
The EIC’s scaling mandate is the right ambition. But deploying €5 billion into companies that hold Europe’s most significant control points, without the node architecture to compound their leverage, produces larger isolated assets — not structural advantage.
My fourth document is where this post is directed at– building a Fusion Readiness Assessment. I am suggesting when an idea is ready to scale, will it have scaling compound.
Let me explain this Fusion Assessment in some detail.
The Problem the EIC Has Not Yet Solved– Fusion
The EIC funds ideas. It develops them, tests them, accelerates them. At each stage of its pipeline — Pathfinder, Transition, Accelerator — it applies criteria to determine whether an idea is ready to move forward. Those criteria are good ones: technology readiness, market validation, team quality, financial milestones.
They assess the idea. They do not assess whether the ecosystem around the idea has reached the conditions under which scaling will compound rather than merely grow.
That distinction is the problem the Scaleup Europe Fund is trying to solve with capital. More money, larger rounds, later stage. But capital deployed into an idea before its ecosystem has reached the decisive inflection point produces a larger, better-funded isolated asset — not a self-sustaining compounding system. The idea grows. It does not compound.
The Fusion Readiness Assessment is the missing instrument. It sits alongside existing EIC criteria — not replacing them — and answers the question that those criteria cannot: has this idea and the ecosystem around it reached the point at which scale capital will compound?
| The EIC’s current handover criteria tell you whether the company is ready. The Fusion Readiness Assessment tells you whether the ecosystem is ready. Both are necessary. Only one currently exists. |
The Fusion Progression in Five Stages
The Fusion Progression describes the natural journey of an idea moving through its ecosystem toward self-sustaining scale. It has five stages. Each stage has its own character, its own observable signals, and its own implication for how the EIC should position its support.
| Gravitational Pull | Attraction | FUSION | Accelerating | New Fields of Opportunity |
| STAGE 1 Gravitational Pull The idea has begun to develop mass. Things are starting to move toward it. |
At this stage the idea is still seeking — seeking connections, seeking capital, seeking partners, seeking market entry. But something has shifted. The direction of movement is beginning to reverse. Occasional inbound interest is appearing that was not created by the company. An industry actor has made contact without being approached. A potential partner has reached out. A researcher has cited the work.
These are small signals. They are not yet structural. But they are the first indication that the idea has developed sufficient mass to begin attracting rather than only pushing. Gravitational Pull is the earliest Fusion precursor — the signal that the approach to the decisive inflection point has begun.
At this stage the EIC’s role is to strengthen the idea’s mass: deepen the technology, sharpen the market position, begin building the ecosystem connections that will become the infrastructure of attraction. Node proximity matters here — an idea developing within or adjacent to a high-density node environment develops gravitational pull faster because the structural elements that enable attraction are already present around it.
| STAGE 2 Attraction Multiple actor classes are orienting toward the idea. The movement has pattern and momentum. |
Attraction is Gravitational Pull becoming structural. The occasional inbound signal has become a pattern. Industry actors are orienting toward the idea across multiple dimensions simultaneously — commercial interest, partnership approaches, talent movement, capital positioning. The idea has become a reference point in its domain.
The decisive test at this stage is whether the attraction is self-generating or EIC-dependent. If the inbound interest disappears when EIC support is withdrawn, it is not yet genuine Attraction — it is reflected light from the EIC’s own authority. Genuine Attraction continues and grows without the EIC’s active promotion. The idea is pulling under its own gravity.
This is where the ecosystem compounding potential signals become readable. Are connections between actors around the idea multiplying rather than adding? Is the intelligence generated by the idea circulating through the ecosystem rather than staying within the company? Are control points in the proximity beginning to orient toward the idea as a domain of interest? These are the Form signals — the evidence that structure is beginning to coalesce around the idea’s gravitational field.
| STAGE 3 FUSION — The Decisive Inflection The ecosystem and the idea have reached critical density. Compounding becomes the natural dynamic. |
Fusion is the decisive inflection point. It is not a company milestone. It is an ecosystem event — the moment at which the intelligence generated by the idea, the structural form that has coalesced around it, and the governance coherence of the surrounding ecosystem combine to produce something self-sustaining.
Capital is now attracted rather than deployed. Adjacent actors activate without being connected. The policy environment is beginning to reflect and react to the idea as a new field of opportunity. The two hard validators — competitive response from incumbents and entanglement through ecosystem roots — are both becoming visible.
The EIC’s role changes at Fusion. Before Fusion, the EIC is scaffolding — keeping the idea alive, building its connections, strengthening its ecosystem position. At Fusion, the EIC shifts to steering — directing the compounding that is now self-generating toward outcomes that serve European sovereign interests. This is the validated handover point for Scaleup Europe Fund investment.
| Fusion is the moment the EIC stops asking ‘can this idea survive without us?’ and starts asking ‘how do we direct what this idea is already generating?’ That shift in question is the operational definition of the decisive inflection point. |
| STAGE 4 Accelerating The compounding is observable and measurable. New actors enter without invitation. |
Post-Fusion, the idea’s ecosystem is in active compounding. New actors are entering without being recruited. Capital is arriving without being summoned. The rate of connection, capability accumulation, and intelligence generation is increasing rather than plateauing. Each new connection multiplies rather than merely adding.
This is where Scaleup Europe Fund capital lands with maximum effect. Not creating momentum — the momentum already exists — but amplifying and directing it. The EIC’s role here is not to generate attraction but to ensure that the compounding is happening within European ecosystem infrastructure, deepening the entanglement that makes the idea unmovable.
| STAGE 5 New Fields of Opportunity The idea has become infrastructure. Others are building on it, not just using it. |
The final stage of the Fusion Progression is the clearest evidence that an idea has fully compounded into structural significance. New fields of opportunity are becoming visible — adjacent applications, derivative ideas, new markets, new domains — that were not conceivable at the idea’s outset. These are emerging not from within the original company but from the broader ecosystem that has grown around the idea.
The idea has become infrastructure. It is being built upon. This is the point at which Pioneer-mode policy engagement becomes appropriate — not reacting to the idea but actively shaping the institutional architecture of the new field it has opened. And it is the point at which the EIC’s next investment generation is identified: the new ideas emerging from the field of opportunity this one has created.
The Assessment in Practice
The Fusion Readiness Assessment is designed to be conducted as a structured conversation between an EIC programme manager and the founding team, informed by the programme manager’s own market and ecosystem intelligence. It is not a form to be completed or a box-ticking exercise. By offering a signal grading, this is a discipline for honest observation, not a mechanical scoring system.
The output is a Fusion Readiness Signal Map: a simple visual representation of where the green, amber, and red signals sit across the three clusters and two Hard Validators. The map tells the programme manager, at a glance, where the idea is in its Fusion Progression and what the appropriate EIC response is.
The Scale Delivery End Point
Everything in the Fusion Readiness Assessment is in service of one outcome: the idea reaches self-sustaining scale that delivers the impact it was funded to deliver. Not a larger portfolio company. Not a stronger EIC track record. Not a better-governed ecosystem as an end in itself.
Delivered scale. In Europe. Compounding. The Fusion Progression describes the path.
There is more within the detail of the paper but the assessment stages are outlined for bringing scale and compounding together
Scale attraction and ecosystem compounding potential are the conditions we must strive for. Fusion is the moment they combine. The Scaleup Europe Fund is the instrument. European sovereign advantage — built through entanglement, anchored through node and control point integration, compounding through the intelligence the ecosystem generates — is the end point. This builds the Fusion State we need
We need to build intervention to accelerate the approach to Fusion. To scale, to compound we move towards fusion.