InCubed stands for ‘Investing in Industrial Innovation’ and is a Public Private Partnership co-funding programme run by the ESA Φ-lab. InCubed focuses on developing innovative and commercially viable products and services that exploit the value of Earth observation imagery and datasets. The programme has a very wide scope and can be used to co-fund anything from building satellites to ground applications and everything between or to develop new EO business models.
If you have an activity in mind, for example, a constellation, a satellite, an instrument, a technology, software, a service or an application related to the Earth observation sector and you want to develop it with ESA’s help and then roll it out commercially then InCubed could be the programme for you. The ultimate aim of InCubed is for your development to reach, at least, the minimum viable product stage and be robust from a technical, commercial, programmatic and financial point of view. Your Intellectual Property Rights, 100%, stay with you. The programme can also support further roll out and scale up if appropriate or can provide a solid demonstration capability for you to seek further funding for scaling and expansion.