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Corallia

Corallia, a unit of Athena Research Center, a think tank, incubator, entrepreneurship accelerator, and multi-cluster facilitator with a vision “to underpin a European innovation ecosystem with the right framework conditions to allow sciences, innovation, and entrepreneurship to flourish”, has recognised, since 2008, the significance of the space sector for Europe and has heavily invested in it, being today one of the main pillars for space research, development and innovation. 

Corallia has supported up to date more than 500 innovative enterprises, of all sizes, to grow in Greece and internationally, of which more than 300 new startups. More than 10.000 people and organisations have directly benefited from our activities, including would-be-entrepreneurs, startups, SMEs, large corporations, pupils and students, while the indirect beneficiaries exceed 100.000 civilians and organisations.

Among our main achievements related to Space are:

  • The foundation of the si-Cluster (Greek Space Technologies and Applications Cluster), one of the three gold label aerospace clusters in Europe, that aims to develop Greece as a leading region for space technologies and applications with a high international visibility, capable of developing and attracting high-impact research, innovation and business activities. Corallia, through the si-Cluster, brings together more than 75 private and public actors in the field of space technologies and applications, and provides an efficient framework around themes of common interest to reinforce the competitive advantage of its members.
  • The establishment of ESA BIC Greece (European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre Greece) in cooperation with ESA and the Ministry of Digital Governance. The Incubator is strengthening the community of successful space-related startups in Greece, by supporting 5 space-related startups every year under the ESA BIC Programme scheme.
  • The establishment of the most prominent business accelerator in Greece, the egg (enter-grow-go), in cooperation with Eurobank (30+ startups every year). The egg offers opportunities for startup mentoring, coaching, marketing, networking, and extroversion via two discrete yet complementary business-support platforms: the egg Startup and the egg Scale-Up business acceleration platforms. 
  • The delivery of the hugest youth entrepreneurship programme in Greece, STARTAB (Start A Business), in cooperation with Prince’s Trust International (200+ new entrepreneurs-to-be every year). The Programme is offered to young people aged 18-35. Participants attend a four-day interactive Explore Enterprise Course and 1-1 mentoring for up to 12 months to develop, design, and test their business idea and mature their business plan. 
  • The organization of all major space-related hackathons in Greece (CASSINI Hackathons 2022-2021, Copernicus Hackathons 2018-2019-2020, ActInSpace 2016-2018, FabSpace 2017, with more than 1.000 registrations and many success stories among the recent ones being the winning team of the 3rd CASSINI Hackathon finals in 2022.
  • The maintenance of a yearly mapping exercise of the Greek Space ecosystem, value chains, activities and technologies in Greece, which lead to an annual update of the Greek Space Catalogue and to a bottom-up annual Greek Space Report and Strategy document for the si-Cluster including the analysis of the Global, European and National space trends on the upstream, midstream and upstream, SWOT analysis, balanced score card objectives seeting, short- and long-term strategy goals and implementation plan.

Within this framework, Corallia has been additionally working towards: 

a) The creation of a “pipeline” that includes all the necessary activities and partners for the creation and development of key space technologies and successful space-related companies; 

b) The creation of substantial space capacity and infrastructure building programs including flight heritage and fully operational space systems and the support of economic sectors of special interest to Greece and Europe with space infrastructures, data, signals and services,

For the former, i.e. a):

  • Starting with educational events and training sessions, Corallia draws the interest of young researchers and entrepreneurs towards the space sector;
  • Moving on with hackathons and space cafés, Corallia capitalises on that interest and brings forward new product ideas and inspires the creation of synergies and complementary teams;
  • Some of those teams are transformed into startups through incubation and acceleration programs;
  • And then, Corallia helps these startups to scale-up with partnerships in Europe and worldwide;
  • Finally, full-grown companies become members of the Greek space cluster and participate to common higher-scale projects and programs.
Last modified
30 September 2024