Do you have a working artistic prototype relevant for food system transitions, sustainable practices, or agri-innovation?
HEClab <Helping Experiments Connect > is a digital platform designed to match artist-led prototypes with real-world opportunities; funding calls, testing environments, and collaborators. Rather than disappearing after a project, your prototype stays actively visible and continuously matched with relevant opportunities through smart matching using AI and semantic analysis recommendations. The platform is designed to help you validate and improve your prototype.
How HEClab Supports Your Prototype
HEClab helps bridge the gap between proof-of-concept and real-world application by connecting your innovations with industry partners, funding programmes, testing environments, and collaborative projects.
HEClab helps bridge the gap between proof-of-concept and real-world application by connecting your innovations with industry partners, funding programmes, testing environments, and collaborative projects.
Benefits for Artists
It has three core benefits for artists:
1. Smart Matching
Rather than spending hours searching fragmented funding databases and networking sites, our AI-driven system identifies calls, partners, and opportunities that align with your specific prototype. Your personal dashboard delivers tailored recommendations: opportunities worth your time.
2. Real-World Testing & Validation
Get connected with testing environments where your prototype can be demonstrated, refined, and validated in real-world contexts.
3. Ongoing Visibility
Your prototype is added to and actively visible in a curated database of innovations that reaches a network of food SMEs, research institutions, funders, and collaborators across Europe.
Sectors
Currently, HEClab prioritises prototypes addressing challenges within:
With time, we will expand to cover additional sectors where artistic prototypes can drive sustainability, so even if your work sits slightly adjacent to food, it is worth adding it to HEClab.
Minimum Prototype Level: TRL 4+
We welcome prototypes as of TRL 4. Here’s what matters:
There’s something tangible: a physical prototype, a tested system, a demonstrated method. It shows your idea isn’t speculative.
It’s showing promise and is ready for real-world validation.
Quick Overview
What we want
Prototypes at TRL 4 or higher (a working proof of concept, not an idea).
What you get
Visibility, smart matching, real-world testing partners in your personalized dashboard.
For whom?
We see artists, creative technologists, designer-makers as potential prototype users of the platform.
How to apply?
Register your profile as an artistic prototype owner.
Cost
Free for artists.
How to Submit Your Prototype
The Bigger Picture
HEClab was born from the Hungry EcoCities project, a European-funded initiative that paired artists with food industry SMEs. In that project, we matched artists with industry partners using exactly this smart platform. The result? Ten final partnerships came from algorithm-driven matches that might never have happened through traditional networking.
Now, HEClab continues its mission as a free, open platform for the creative innovation community. Your prototype could be the next one to find an unexpected partner, a testing ground, or the validation it needs to develop into art-driven innovation value.
The platform is in beta and being actively developed. If you have feedback after submitting: about the submission process, the dashboard, or anything else, we would love to hear from you. Your input helps shape how HEClab evolves.
