Commercialisation pathways for EU R&D- A practical guide to business modelling, validation, and scale - Based on the FOR-FREIGHT pilots

This paper examines how EU transport R&D results can move from pilots to sustained market uptake in European multimodal logistics. It argues that commercialisation is constrained by the ecosystem nature of freight networks, where value losses cluster at organisational interfaces due to misaligned identifiers, fragmented event data, and limited interoperability across proprietary systems. Drawing on the FOR-FREIGHT project, the paper synthesises evidence from three pilots that represent distinct corridor and maturity profiles: (i) Spain, combining port-side planning and document digitalisation with a quantified metro-based last-mile alternative, (ii) Greece, targeting port-to-airport coordination with defined baselines and improvement targets for idle time, customs processes, errors, storage efficiency, and capacity, and (iii) Romania, addressing inland port to rail transshipment fragmentation through IoT-enabled visibility, planning support, and carbon footprint assessment. The analysis shows that uptake depends on the joint maturity of technology, governance, and delivery capability, and that pilots must function as market experiments that generate measurable value proof. It concludes that modular service packaging, governance-by-design, and iterative business modelling reduce adoption risk, enable staged procurement, and increase the likelihood that project outputs persist beyond the funding period, while aligning efficiency gains with sustainability and regulatory drivers.