Gerald BUSCA

Transforming Innovation into Funded, Commercially Viable and Impactful Projects

For over 18 years, I have worked at the intersection of innovation, technology, funding and commercialisation, helping businesses, researchers and collaborative partnerships turn ambitious ideas into credible, fundable and impactful projects.

As a Senior Proposal Writer and Innovation Consultant at Inventya, I support innovative SMEs, start-ups, scale-ups, universities and research-led organisations in navigating the complex UK and European innovation funding landscape. My role goes well beyond grant writing. I work with innovators to understand the technology, challenge the proposition, identify the right funding strategy and build a compelling case that connects technical excellence, market need, commercial opportunity and measurable impact.

I have extensive experience with Horizon Europe, including Research and Innovation Actions (RIA), Innovation Actions (IA) and Coordination and Support Actions (CSA), as well as programmes such as EIC Accelerator, EIC Transition, Eurostars, Innovate UK and other national and European innovation funding schemes. I work across Technology Readiness Levels, from early-stage research and technology development through validation, demonstration, scale-up and market deployment.

My background allows me to work across a broad range of scientific, engineering and deep-tech sectors, quickly getting to grips with complex technologies and translating them into clear and persuasive funding propositions. I am particularly interested in projects where strong science and engineering need to be connected with a credible business case, market opportunity and route to impact.

A significant part of my work involves funding strategy and project development. I help organisations identify the most appropriate opportunities, assess strategic fit and readiness, develop project concepts, structure work programmes, build consortia and coordinate complex multi-partner applications. I also support the development of commercial narratives, market positioning, financial justification and routes to commercialisation.

However, securing funding is only part of the journey.

I am also involved in the exploitation, dissemination and communication of funded innovation projects, particularly within European collaborative programmes. This includes developing exploitation and commercialisation strategies, supporting market analysis and stakeholder engagement, identifying exploitable results and routes to market, managing innovation and IP-related activities, and ensuring that project outcomes reach the organisations, industries and communities that can benefit from them. My work also encompasses dissemination activities including project communications, publications, digital channels, stakeholder engagement and the visibility of research results.

I particularly enjoy working within multidisciplinary and international consortia, where universities, research organisations, SMEs, corporates, clinicians, engineers and end users must come together around a common objective. I see my role as helping create the bridge between these different perspectives, ensuring that excellent research is matched by a credible implementation strategy and a clear pathway towards adoption, exploitation and long-term impact.

At the heart of my approach is a simple principle: a successful innovation project needs more than an excellent idea. It needs the right funding strategy, convincing evidence of need, strong partners, a realistic development pathway and a clear understanding of how the results will ultimately create economic, societal or environmental value.

I enjoy asking the difficult questions early, simplifying complexity and helping teams articulate not only what they want to develop, but why it matters, who needs it, how it will reach them and what happens after the funded project ends.

Outside work, martial arts have taught me discipline, resilience and focus; walking and cycling satisfy my curiosity and need to explore; and cooking provides a rather different outlet for experimentation and creativity.

For me, innovation funding is not simply about winning grants. It is about turning promising ideas into well-designed projects, and well-designed projects into innovations with genuine real-world impact.