EU project CITADELS turns public research infrastructure into a shared resource for companies, researchers and students – and a reason for talent to stay.
Vienna, Austria, 14 August 2026 – The CITADELS project has published a collection of more than 50 DeepTech TestBeds, opening up their laboratories in nine European countries to companies, researchers and students, and making public research infrastructure in widening regions usable by the industries around it.
Widening countries have invested substantially in advanced public research infrastructure in recent years, but that equipment is not always visible to the people who could use it. Laboratories describe their capabilities in different ways, or not publicly at all, so a small manufacturer rarely knows what exists nearby and a graduate rarely sees a reason to stay. The pattern is familiar: research capacity in one place, industrial demand in another, and talent leaving for larger economies
The CITADELS catalogue lists more than 50 TestBeds hosted by project partners across six categories, from robotics and extended reality to artificial intelligence and biotechnology. They include the SafeCo Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Assembly TestBed at Industrial Hub Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which supports experimentation at technology readiness levels 4 to 6, and the LaserFlex Robotic Laser Welding Cell. Every entry follows the same format, naming the host organisation, a contact person and a physical address, and setting out application cases, user groups, standards and safety considerations, so that a company can judge in minutes whether a facility is worth a phone call.
The catalogue is the entry point to a wider effort. Over four years, the EU project CITADELS will move 20 research talents and 20 research and innovation support talents between academic and industrial settings, building the technical, entrepreneurial and managerial skills that make a research career viable outside the university. For companies, and particularly for smaller ones, access to public infrastructure and the expertise attached to it lowers the cost of testing a technology before committing to it. For the host institutions, a steady flow of real industrial problems sharpens research and strengthens the case for further investment. The effect is intended to compound: better-trained people, more capable local industry, closer collaboration between the two, and career paths attractive enough to keep talent in the regions that trained it.
CITADELS runs until August 2029. Organisations hosting relevant facilities can add a TestBed through an open form on the European Commission’s EU Survey platform, linked from the catalogue at www.deeptech-citadels.com. Companies, researchers and students who want to use a TestBed should contact the host named in each entry. Calls for participating talents will be announced through the project website and its LinkedIn channel.
About CITADELS
CITADELS (Cultivating Industry 5.0 Talents: Academia-industry collaboration and empowerment through accessible DEep technoLogieS) is a four-year Coordination and Support Action funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe, running from 1 September 2025. The project works to transform seven widening countries into citadels of human-centric Industry 5.0 by aligning academic research excellence with industrial need.
In practice this means opening public research infrastructure to private users, circulating 40 research and innovation talents between academia and industry, and building the capacity of local ecosystems to adopt advanced technology. The intended result is fewer researchers leaving for larger economies, more high-value jobs in the regions that train them, and stronger economic resilience and social cohesion across the widening countries.
The project is coordinated by the University of Belgrade – School of Electrical Engineering and brings together 10 partners from nine countries: four academic institutions, three DeepTech companies, a science and technology park, and two EU-level partners – EIT Manufacturing East for pan-European reach, and Knowledge and Innovation for responsible research and innovation practice.
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