JIC — South Moravian Innovation Centre: A Six-Founder Knowledge-Transfer Hub (Brno)

JIC (Jihomoravské inovační centrum / South Moravian Innovation Centre) was established in 2003 as an association of six public and academic founders: the South Moravian Region, the City of Brno, and four universities — Masaryk University, Brno University of Technology, Mendel University, and the University of Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

JIC exists to move research and ideas from those universities into companies. It runs three technology incubators — JIC INTECH for ICT, engineering and medical materials; JIC INBIT for biotechnology, based on the Masaryk University campus; and JIC INMEC for advanced materials, opened in 2014 — plus the KUMST creative hub (2020), the FabLab open workshop (2017), and JIC Ventures, a seed-investment arm founded in 2015. Companies move through staged programmes from idea validation (JIC ENTER) to international-market acceleration (JIC MASTER) and support for established SMEs (JIC PLATINN).

According to JIC's own 15-year retrospective, the centre had supported over 300 companies employing nearly 6,500 people with combined revenues of approximately CZK 30 billion; firms enrolled in JIC PLATINN grew turnover roughly nine times faster than comparable non-participating companies. An independent EBN network profile separately records JIC as EU|BIC-accredited, with 'more than 250 technology companies' supported historically and currently managing over 60 resident hi-tech companies with 300 employees. Its best-known alumnus, Kiwi.com (formerly Skypicker), grew sales 7,000% over four years to become, in 2017, the fastest-growing tech company in Central Europe; other notable graduates include Y Soft, Flowmon Networks, Safetica Technologies and IDEA StatiCa.

A caveat: the 300-company and 250-company figures come from different snapshots (JIC's own 15-year report vs. the EBN network profile) rather than a single audited count, so they should be read as consistent orders of magnitude rather than one precise, independently verified total.

Read JIC's 15-year retrospective: https://www.jic.cz/en/o-nas/pro-media/south-moravian-innovation-centre-15-years

Read the full analysis: https://czechstartups.gov.cz/inkub_akcel_en/south-moravian-innovation-centre-jic/