Shaping the Deep Tech Revolution in Agriculture 2025

Masters 4.0 Bioinformatics is a national initiative in Serbia led by C4IR Serbia and the Ministry of Education to modernize university curricula in bioinformatics through structured collaboration among academia, research institutions and the private sector. As part of the initiative, private companies directly contributed to the curriculum design, shared their industry expertise through teaching roles, and supported scholarships and mentorship for students. This structure ensures that graduates are equipped with applied, market-relevant skills in areas such as genomics, AI algorithms and computational biology. The initiative exemplifies how coordinated public–private collaboration can close capability gaps in emerging deep- tech fields and build a workforce aligned with real-world innovation needs. It offers a replicable model for scaling deep-tech ecosystems in other sectors including agriculture.CASE STUDY 11 Seeding industry–academia collaboration to build human capital in deep tech – Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), Serbia Bhashini, launched under India’s National Language Translation Mission, is a Government of India-led initiative to develop a public digital infrastructure for language translation and speech technologies in Indian languages. It provides open-source datasets, language models and APIs for automatic speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech systems. For deep-tech start-ups, Bhashini reduces the barriers to entry by enabling the integration of vernacular voice and text interfaces into their use cases. This facilitates broader outreach to non-English-speaking users, supports regional deployment at scale and lowers the cost of building multilingual digital tools. By offering shared language infrastructure, Bhashini plays a foundational role in supporting the development and adoption of inclusive AI solutions in India’s diverse linguistic landscape.CASE STUDY 12 Digital public infrastructure to scale generative AI and natural language processing – Bhashini Universities play a pivotal role in enabling deep tech to thrive by fostering research, incubation and knowledge exchange. Through collaborative partnerships with industry, start-ups and policy-makers, academia can bridge fundamental science with field-ready innovation. By providing talent pipelines, testing grounds and thought leadership, universities help accelerate the journey from discovery to deployment. Deep tech flourishes where rigorous inquiry meets practical collaboration – and academia is the catalyst that makes this possible. Dimitrios Salampasis, Associate Professor, Emerging Technologies and Fintech, Swinburne University of Technology Shaping the Deep-Tech Revolution in Agriculture 36