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The round table is now a fixture of NanoInnovation, and its recent editions have traced a deliberate arc. Together, they have explored the evolving role of Research Infrastructures within the European research and innovation ecosystem: in 2024, as open-access platforms and shared facilities supporting technology transfer; in 2025, as strategic enablers of innovation pathways in the age of artificial intelligence. In both cases, the focus was on the technologies, expertise and open-access services that infrastructures offer to research and industry.
The 2026 edition takes the third step and is guided by one overarching question: what do Research Infrastructures deliver when they are fully operational? The two previous editions examined what exists and why it matters. This edition turns to evidence of impact: what changes, measurably, in a laboratory, on a production line or along a clinical pathway as a result of access to an infrastructure.
The timing is deliberate. Exceptional European and national public investment has equipped Italy and the wider European research system with a new generation of research and technology infrastructures. The question is no longer how to build them, but how to convert this investment into lasting capability: scientific excellence, industrial competitiveness, advanced skills and societal benefit. That conversion depends on sound governance, sustainable operating models and credible evidence of results; investment momentum alone is not enough.
This edition also widens the frame to the life sciences, where these issues are especially acute. In this domain, a result generated through an infrastructure is not merely a measurement: it must be traceable, reproducible and robust enough to withstand regulatory scrutiny and support clinical validation. This applies across nanomedicine, biotechnology, medical devices and precision healthcare. An access and quality-assurance model that meets these requirements sets a demanding benchmark for every other sector.
Bringing together infrastructure managers, public institutions, large companies and SMEs, and the life sciences and healthcare communities, the discussion will address this overarching question through four connected dimensions of delivery. These are: governance and financial sustainability beyond the investment cycle; industrial uptake of open-access services, with particular attention to the barriers facing SMEs and the intermediation and support needed to overcome them; quality assurance, traceability and interoperability of research data as foundations of trust between laboratory, factory and clinic; and the contribution of infrastructure capabilities, together with the skills needed to operate them, to European technological sovereignty across critical technologies — advanced materials, micro- and nanoelectronics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and health technologies.
The aim is not to survey facilities, but to define a shared, evidence-based agenda: what Research Infrastructures have delivered, where their limits remain, and what is needed for them to serve as a lasting bridge between science, technology, industry and healthcare.
Four supporting questions at a glance
- Governance and sustainability. Which governance and funding models can sustain infrastructure capabilities beyond the current investment cycle, and how should their long-term value be demonstrated?
- Industrial uptake. What still prevents SMEs from using open-access services, and which forms of intermediation and support would remove those barriers?
- Quality and data. Which shared standards and practices for quality assurance, traceability and interoperability are needed to make results trustworthy and reusable from laboratory to factory to clinic?
- Technological sovereignty and skills. Which infrastructure capabilities and professional profiles are essential for Europe to build and retain strategic capacity across critical technologies?
Panel
The panel will bring together infrastructure managers; representatives of public institutions responsible for policy and funding; large companies and SMEs; and members of the life sciences and healthcare communities.
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