Northern Ireland has long been recognised for its strength in cybersecurity, software engineering, and data-driven innovation. What is changing now is the pace at which deep research is being translated into real companies, real products, and real economic value.
At the centre of this shift is Queen’s University Belfast’s growing role as a global research powerhouse — and Momentum One Zero’s role in turning that research into commercial opportunity.
From Research Excellence to Commercial Opportunity
Queen’s University Belfast has built international credibility across cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, wireless systems, and trusted data — disciplines that underpin many of today’s most pressing industrial challenges. But successful innovation ecosystems do not thrive on research strength alone.
The real challenge lies in translation: moving from a research breakthrough to something a customer can deploy, trust, and bring to market.
This is where Momentum One Zero plays a critical role. Operating as a business-led innovation centre within Queen’s and delivered through the Belfast Region City Deal, Momentum One Zero brings researchers, engineers, founders, and industry partners into a shared delivery environment. The focus is not theory, but execution.
Speaking the Same Language Across Sectors
One of the defining challenges in deep tech commercialisation is alignment of different stakeholders. Academic researchers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and enterprise buyers often approach innovation from fundamentally different perspectives.
Momentum One Zero addresses this by acting as a translation layer. Commercial staff, Engineers, and delivery leads work alongside academic teams to frame research in terms of real-world problems, regulatory constraints, integration requirements, and market demand.
This approach has proven particularly effective in cross-sector contexts, such as digital health, sustainability, and secure AI – areas where innovation must satisfy technical, ethical, and commercial requirements simultaneously.
Rather than forcing all parties into a single model, Momentum One Zero creates structured collaboration environments where each stakeholder contributes expertise while working toward a shared outcome.
From Breakthrough to Product: What the Pathway Looks Like
There is no single timeline for commercialisation. Some technologies move from lab to market in under two years; others require five or more. What matters is having a clear pathway.
Typically, the journey begins with proof-of-principle research, followed by early validation with industry partners. From there, technologies may progress through prototyping, pilot deployments, and eventually into spin-out companies or licensed products.
Momentum One Zero supports this journey by providing engineering capability, secure compute infrastructure, and access to commercial expertise — reducing the risk and friction that often stall promising research.
Case Studies: Deep Tech in Action
Upper Bound: Securing the Next Generation of Autonomous AI
Upper Bound represents a new class of deep-tech spin-out emerging from Queen’s University Belfast’s cybersecurity and AI research ecosystem. Originating from the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), the company addresses a fast-evolving and globally significant challenge: how to secure autonomous AI systems operating beyond direct human control.
As organisations increasingly deploy AI agents to make decisions, automate workflows, and interact with other systems, traditional cybersecurity tools fall short. Upper Bound’s platform, AIDR (AI Detection & Response), is designed to monitor AI agents from within; detecting threats such as prompt injection, manipulation of reasoning chains, and adversarial behaviour that standard perimeter-based security simply cannot see.
What differentiates Upper Bound is the depth of research underpinning the technology. Years of academic work in adversarial AI, secure systems, and trusted autonomy have been translated into a platform built for real-world deployment. However, making that leap from research excellence to enterprise-ready product requires more than technical insight alone.
This is where Momentum One Zero plays a critical role. Through access to engineering expertise, secure compute environments, and industry-facing delivery support, Momentum One Zero enables Upper Bound to validate its technology in realistic operational contexts. The centre helps bridge the gap between theoretical robustness and practical usability, supporting everything from system integration to engagement with early adopters across regulated sectors.
The result is a spin-out positioned not just as an academic success story, but as a globally relevant company operating at the frontier of AI security. As autonomous systems become more widespread, the work being done by Upper Bound, supported and accelerated through Momentum One Zero’s ecosystem, has the potential to shape international best practice in AI assurance and resilience.
Know more about Upper Bound at upperbound.org
Sourcing Lens: Turning Net-Zero Ambition into Actionable Insight
Sourcing Lens demonstrates how deep research can be applied to one of the most pressing challenges facing organisations today: how to deliver credible, transparent progress towards net-zero commitments.
Emerging from research within Queen’s School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Sourcing Lens combines agentic AI, trusted data architectures, and blockchain-enabled traceability to address gaps in sustainability reporting and procurement decision-making. The platform is designed to help organisations understand not just what they are buying, but the environmental and ethical implications embedded within complex supply chains.
Through Momentum One Zero, the Sourcing Lens team can move beyond conceptual modelling into structured market engagement. Working with engineers, innovation leads, and commercial specialists, the company tested its assumptions against real procurement workflows and ESG reporting requirements.
Engagement with more than 30 organisations — spanning SMEs, corporates, and public-sector bodies — provided critical insight into customer needs, regulatory pressures, and operational constraints. This feedback informed the evolution of the platform, ensuring it addressed real-world pain points rather than abstract sustainability metrics.
Momentum One Zero’s role in this journey was not to dictate direction, but to reduce friction. By providing access to secure infrastructure, engineering capability, and a collaborative environment, the centre enabled Sourcing Lens to iterate rapidly while maintaining technical and commercial credibility.
Today, Sourcing Lens stands as an example of how research-led innovation can be shaped by industry reality — turning sustainability ambition into actionable, data-driven decision-making. The company’s progress highlights Momentum One Zero’s ability to support ventures operating at the intersection of AI, data, and policy-driven markets.
Know more about Sourcing Lens at sourcing-lens.com
Antennaware: Amplifying Wireless Research into Real-World Deployment
Antennaware is a Queen’s University Belfast spin-out specialising in advanced antenna and wireless sensing technologies, and founded in 2020. Its research-driven technology addresses challenges in areas such as sensing, connectivity, and data capture — capabilities that are increasingly critical across sectors including healthcare, smart infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing. Translating this research into deployable systems, however, requires access to specialist environments, cross-disciplinary expertise, and pathways into industry collaboration. In 2026, founder Dr. Conway will transition from academia into AntennaWare on a full-time basis as CEO, with a goal to grow the commercial potential of the business and realise the true impact potential for the technology over the next two years.
Momentum One Zero can support Antennaware in a variety of ways going forward – for example, through engaging with engineers, cybersecurity specialists, and industry partners to explore how its wireless innovations integrate into larger digital systems.
Momentum One Zero can act to connect companies like Antennaware to a broader innovation ecosystem. By facilitating collaboration with companies working in AI, data analytics, and secure systems, the centre helps extend the relevance of Antennaware’s research into new domains and use cases.
This relationship illustrates a key principle underpinning Momentum One Zero: not every innovation needs to start inside the centre to benefit from it. By supporting Queen’s spin-outs like Antennaware, Momentum One Zero strengthens the overall pipeline of deep-tech innovation, de-risking technology development and ensuring that research excellence is not only preserved, but scaled and applied in ways that generate real economic and societal value.
Know more about Antennaware at antennaware.com
What Comes Next: The Next 3–5 Years
Over the next three to five years, Momentum One Zero expects to see a steady pipeline of spin-outs, licensed technologies, and industry-led collaborations emerge from its ecosystem.
Outputs will include patents, secure AI platforms, digital health tools, sustainability systems, and new venture formation — alongside a growing pool of industry-ready graduates and researchers with hands-on delivery experience.
The long-term ambition is not volume for its own sake, but quality: fewer, stronger companies built on research that can compete internationally while remaining rooted in Northern Ireland.
Sync NI's Spring 2026 magazine explores innovation and collaboration transforming Northern Ireland's technology ecosystem
This issue features exclusive insights from industry leaders on AI transformation, cybersecurity evolution, legal technology innovation, and how strategic partnerships between academia and business are accelerating real-world impact across the region.
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