CSIRO ON — Australia's National Research Commercialisation Accelerator

CSIRO's ON programme (ON Accelerate / ON Prime) is a structured translation and commercialisation programme for publicly funded researchers, running multi-week cohorts that pair research teams with entrepreneurship training, industry mentors and investor introductions. By 2025–26 it had reached its ninth and tenth cohorts, each selecting 10–11 teams from CSIRO and partner universities (recent cohorts drew teams from the University of Melbourne, the University of Newcastle, UTS, Flinders University and UNSW).

The programme aims to translate publicly funded research into commercial ventures by giving research teams structured entrepreneurship training, industry mentoring and investor introductions.

Selected teams take part in multi-week cohorts combining entrepreneurship training, industry mentors and investor introductions; each team receives roughly AUD150,000 in direct participation funding plus up to AUD80,000 in performance-based payments.

As of the ninth cohort (2025), ON alumni had collectively secured around AUD336 million in commercialisation grants; by the tenth cohort (2026) CSIRO reported alumni had gone on to raise over AUD800 million in total funding, split between AUD371m+ in commercialisation grants and AUD433m+ raised directly by new ventures — figures corroborated independently, with different point-in-time totals, by Australian business press covering successive cohorts. CSIRO states the programme has equipped more than 7,800 researchers and innovators across 62 partner research organisations with commercialisation skills, and that alumni companies have created 700+ jobs in high-impact sectors.

The reach and researcher-training figures (7,800+ researchers, 700+ jobs) come from CSIRO's own reporting. Independent press coverage corroborates the headline funding totals but does not independently verify the training and jobs figures, so those specific numbers should be read as self-reported.