Field Notes / The Lab-to-Market Map
Navigating the Australian Deep Tech Commercialisation Landscape.
If you're commercialising complex technology in Australia, out of a lab, a university or your own garage, the support system is genuinely rich, and with so many different avenues on offer it can be complex to navigate. There are more grants, programs and partners available than most founders realise, and the challenge is simply knowing which ones fit you and in what order. This is a go-to-market tool, not just an overview. Tick what describes you and your route lights up in numbered order, Now, Next and Later. It will not run neatly left to right, and that is the point: the founders who move fastest are the best sequenced, not the best funded.
Ready to map your way in?
Three quick questions, and your route from lab to market lights up below.
Two things worth knowing before you start. Nobody commercialises deep tech alone in Australia; the companies that move fastest stack grants, research partnerships and capital deliberately, in the right order. And you don't need venture backing: non-dilutive funding in this system is deeper than most founders realise.
Colour key
By function
Tick a box above, or try a preset, and your path lights up on the map in rough priority order. Most of these run in parallel, not one after another.
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Context: why the order matters
The National Reconstruction Fund holds $15 billion across seven priority areas, the R&D Tax Incentive returns up to 43.5 cents per eligible dollar, and programs from CSIRO's ON to the Industry Growth Program and Australia's Economic Accelerator each fund a different stage of the same journey. The founders who move fastest are not the best-funded, they are the best-sequenced: research partnerships before translation grants, translation grants before venture capital, and a named first customer before all of it if you can manage it. This map is built to make that sequence visible.
Before you have these conversations
A readiness checklist
Hopefully your route is clearer. Before you start the conversations it points to, make sure the fundamentals are in place.
Your narrative is anchored to a problem someone will pay to solve
Not "here's our breakthrough", but "here's the expensive, recognised problem this closes, and for whom." Grants, investors and customers all buy the same thing: a problem they already believe in, solved credibly. Lead with it.
Your IP position is settled before you talk publicly
File the provisional before the conference talk, the pitch night and the journal paper. If the technology has university origins, the licence conversation with the tech transfer office comes before incorporation, not after.
Your R&D Tax Incentive registration is live
Up to 43.5 cents per eligible dollar, refundable, is the deepest non-dilutive pool in the system, and it runs on contemporaneous documentation. Register with AusIndustry inside the deadline and keep experiment records as you go, not retrospectively.
You know your grant stack and its sequence
ON to AEA to Industry Growth Program is a sequence, not a menu. Each program expects a different maturity, and arriving at the right one at the right stage is the difference between funded and politely declined.
You have a named first customer, even before they've paid
A named organisation with the problem, engaged in a conversation, transforms every other conversation on this map. Investors fund evidence, programs score commercial pathways, and nothing evidences like a customer.
Your regulatory and export position is understood
TGA for medtech, CASA for anything that flies, export controls for anything dual-use. The pathway determines your timeline, your markets and sometimes your cap table. Know it before an investor asks.
Programs, funds and eligibility criteria in this ecosystem change constantly: rounds open and close, thresholds move, and names get reorganised. This blueprint was built from publicly available sources and is intended as a useful, indicative guide, not a definitive record. Confirm every program's current status on business.gov.au and the administering agency's own site before acting.
Murphy & Company is not a grants consultant or financial adviser, but can help you position your company so that every one of these conversations lands better.
About this map
How the Australian deep tech commercialisation system fits together
Australia backs deep tech more generously than most founders realise. A founder commercialising complex technology here has access to a remarkable range of support: funding through CSIRO ON (the national research accelerator), AEA (Australia’s Economic Accelerator), IGP (the Industry Growth Program), RDTI (the R&D Tax Incentive), CRC-P (Cooperative Research Centres Projects), the NRF (National Reconstruction Fund) and EMDG (Export Market Development Grants), research partners, and customers across corporate, government and export markets. With that many avenues available, the system can be complex to navigate, and working out which doors fit you, and in what order to knock, is the natural first question. This map answers it in one place.
This interactive map draws the ecosystem as a single blueprint. It covers the layers a founder needs to understand: the foundations of IP, tech transfer and deep tech incubation; the capital stack from angels and university funds through deep tech VC to the National Reconstruction Fund and state investment vehicles; the research and translation layer of CSIRO, the ARC, CRCs, Australia's Economic Accelerator and the Trailblazer universities; the Commonwealth program layer, including the Industry Growth Program, the R&D Tax Incentive and Austrade's export machinery; and the markets themselves, corporate first customers, government procurement, regulators and export pathways.
Tick the boxes that describe your company, your sector, where the technology originated, its maturity and your capital position, and the map lights up a suggested pathway through the system, node by node, with a plain-language explanation of what each organisation does, what it wants from you, and how to approach it.
The map is built for founders asking practical questions: how to sequence grants against a raise, when ON or AEA fits relative to the Industry Growth Program, what the tech transfer office actually controls, why a paid pilot changes every other conversation, and which doors are worth knocking on at each stage of maturity.
If your technology is defence-relevant, read this alongside the companion defence procurement landscape map, which charts that world in the same format, and the wider thinking in Field Notes.
Your path is clear. Now let's talk about your narrative.
Knowing where you sit in this ecosystem is just the beginning. Speaking a language that gets investors, grant assessors and first customers excited, in the context of what the system actually wants, is where the real craft comes in: closing what I call the commercial translation gap. If that's where you need help, let's talk.
Or if you'd rather talk it through directly, get in touch.
Built by Chris Murphy. I help deep-tech founders close the commercial translation gap.
Fifteen years of cross-category growth and brand work, including Equilibrium Aerospace and Atomic Tessellator.