A5X: The Ascent Series is a curated lead-up to NUS Enterprise’s flagship A5X: Global Innovation & Venture Summit.
This series brings you closer to the leaders who have already mastered the climb, offering the first-hand insights necessary for the challenging road ahead.
Your ascent starts today as we tackle one of deep-tech’s toughest execution challenges:
Translating breakthrough materials from lab to market is one of deep-tech’s toughest execution challenges – not because the science is weak, but because most teams fail to cross the “valley of death” between proof of concept and credible technology demonstrator.
Join Alberto Ortona, Head of the Hybrid Materials Laboratory (HM Lab) at Switzerland’s SUPSI-MEMTi, for a practitioner’s guide to moving advanced and architected materials from early-stage research into industrially relevant solutions for energy, aerospace, defence, and demanding industrial applications.
Drawing on Swiss and European experience in one of the world’s highest-performing innovation ecosystems, he will unpack how to align technical development, funding strategy, and ecosystem support to systematically de-risk deep-tech innovation.
Through real cases in porous ceramics, additive manufacturing, and industry partnerships, this session will show how structured public funding, incubators, and targeted collaborations can limit financial exposure while building validated demonstrators that industry actually adopts. The Swiss staged funding landscape and European Innovation Council schemes will be discussed as reference models with strong parallels to Singapore’s own excellence-driven ecosystem.
What You’ll Learn
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Translation in practice: How to connect design requirements to commercialisation outcomes in advanced materials projects.
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The “valley of death” in action: A practical framework for moving from proof of concept to technology demonstrator without excessive financial exposure.
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Partnership models that work: How incubators and industry collaborations reduce execution, market, and qualification risk in high-spec sectors.
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A de-risking playbook: Simple, reusable frameworks to decide what to commercialise at each maturity stage, and how to combine funding, partnerships, and ecosystem support for sustainable industrial impact.
Event details
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26 March 2026 (Thursday)
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10:30 AM – 11:30 AM (SGT), Registration starts 10 AM.
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NUS Enterprise Seminar Room 3
Join us for the event via this link: https://luma.com/h8tkd7f2
Limited spots. RSVP early.
About Prof. Alberto Ortona
Graduated in Naval and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Naples in 1989, Prof. Ortona specialized in composite materials at the University of Delaware’s Center for Composite Materials in 1992. After a decade in the industry, he became full professor at SUPSI, where he leads the Hybrid Materials Laboratory at MEMTi. He is also a co-founder of the EngiCer Company (CH) and a faculty member at the Doctoral School of Industrial Engineering at the University of Padova (I).
His research focuses on process engineering of polymer and ceramic matrix composites, oxide and carbide ceramics, and on computational design and additive manufacturing of architected ceramics. At MEMTi-SUPSI, he has led more that 30 national and European projects.
Prof. Ortona has published more that 100 papers and 10 international patents He is Associate Editor for The Journal of the American Ceramic Society and for Materials. In recognition of his contributions to ceramics and materials science, he received the 2025 Global Star Award at the 49th International Conference and Expo on Advanced Ceramics and Composites (ICACC2025) in Daytona Beach (USA). Alberto Ortona’s paper “High-strength Si–SiC lattices prepared by powder bed fusion, infiltration-pyrolysis, and reactive silicon infiltration” has received the John E. Marquis Award, as the best article of the Manufacturing Division of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS) for the year 2024.
