Elevo Innovation Hub is not an incubator in the usual sense of the term, like the structures that host startups and support them in the hope of helping them scale. It is not a technology transfer platform either, designed simply to connect academic research with industry.
Elevo Innovation Hub, EIH, is Elemaster’s strategic initiative created to support startups during their growth and development journey. Its role, however, is more specific: it works on the project of the product. It enters the process at the architectural stage, before execution pressure begins and while the decisions that will later determine production costs are still open to change.
Designing the project
Consider a mechanical engineer coming out of a PhD, creating a deep-tech startup with the ambition to disrupt the market. At that stage, the focus will likely be on technology transfer and fundraising. Less attention may be given to whether the product can actually be manufactured efficiently and at a sustainable cost.
This is exactly the point at which EIH becomes relevant.
“We can call ourselves an elevator: we’re not aiming to create an incubator nor an accelerator, that’s a structured market with more than a decade old know-how we can’t and shouldn’t try to compete with”, says Ivo Boniolo, Head of Elevo Innovation Hub.
What is often missing in the market is an actor able to carry out a rigorous analysis of the product itself. This means understanding what the product will really cost when manufactured at scale, which supply chain constraints may emerge later and how the compromises made on paper today may affect margins tomorrow.
With almost fifty years of experience in electronics, mechanics and mechatronics, Elemaster can support startups in addressing these questions before they enter the market.
EIH does not operate as a traditional consultancy and does not take equity stakes in the companies it supports. It is designed instead as a selective industrial access point. Its model is built around reducing the friction that often prevents early-stage deep-tech companies from working with an experienced manufacturing group before their product architecture is sufficiently mature.
The immediate objective is not to maximise the margin generated by advisory services. The aim is to qualify opportunities earlier, reduce downstream industrial risk and help promising technologies move towards a more realistic production path.
For Elemaster, the long-term value lies in building trusted relationships with companies that may later need support from a design, engineering, industrialisation or manufacturing partner.
In this sense, EIH is not a low-cost service for startups. It is a structured business development mechanism, one that applies industrial expertise at the right moment to make future collaborations more credible, better prepared and more valuable for both sides.
The surrounding ecosystem
Launched in October 2025, EIH is developing partnerships with universities and research facilities. This type of cooperation is notoriously difficult to structure effectively.
The failure models are familiar. On one side, academia can be treated like a consultancy firm, with deadlines and deliverables that it is not structurally able to meet. On the other, research projects can be commissioned and then forgotten, only to reappear years later as evidence that something interesting had once been attempted.
EIH is working on a third path. It collaborates with universities during the architectural phase, when timelines are still open enough to allow genuine exploration.
On the acceleration side, EIH is part of Imec.istart, one of Europe’s most established deep-tech programmes. Launched in 2011 and currently active in Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy, Imec.istart is a globally recognised programme with a portfolio of more than 350 startups and scaleups, mainly operating in deep tech.
The objective is to identify, within its cohorts, the companies that are most likely to benefit from early-stage industrial design support.
EIH is also defining a partnership with a foundation dedicated to chips, with the goal of placing itself at the centre of the conversation around innovation in the electronic industry.
In parallel with these partnerships, Elevo Hub hosts Weletech events. These meetings are designed to create structured encounters between startups and industrial players, while also encouraging internal talks that bring external stimuli into Elemaster itself.
Their frequency is intentionally limited, so that each event can remain a curated moment with the potential to generate real impact.
A network in the making
Eight months after the start of its operations, Elevo Innovation Hub has around ten active project collaborations in progress. These projects range from medical devices to space technology.
These are sectors in which Elemaster has built decades of experience, and they are also high-value niches where this type of approach is particularly meaningful.
The numbers are intentionally modest. The pipeline is still young and the model remains selective by design.
Building a European innovation model
As the startup model developed across Europe, much of its language and many of its financial mechanisms were naturally imported from Silicon Valley. That model has delivered extraordinary results and continues to be one of the most powerful engines of technological growth in the world.
Europe, however, operates within a different industrial context.
In the United States, venture-backed companies have often been built around the need to scale rapidly, integrate capabilities and create new industrial infrastructures around breakthrough technologies.
In Europe, and especially in Italy, the starting point is different. A dense network of specialised manufacturers, engineering companies, suppliers and industrial districts already exists.
The question, therefore, is not whether Europe should reproduce the American model. The real issue is how the startup logic can be adapted to Europe’s own industrial strengths.
For product-focused deep-tech companies, this means connecting earlier with factories, engineering partners and SMEs that already know how to make complex products reliable, compliant and scalable.
“We should not ask every product-focused startup to rebuild from scratch what Europe already has: advanced factories, specialised suppliers, engineering know-how and industrial districts,” adds Ivo Boniolo. “The challenge is to make these assets accessible earlier, when product architecture is still open and industrial choices can still shape cost, reliability and scalability. Italy does not lack manufacturing capability. It lacks, too often, the structured conversation between that capability and the people building the next generation of products.”.
Elemaster understands this position particularly well. For almost fifty years, it has been making other people’s products, without owning intellectual property of its own.
Elevo Innovation Hub is, in part, the way this begins to change: a move from contract manufacturer to a partner that helps shape what gets built, not only how it is built.