Bianca Forte: Bridging the gap between academia and industry
Bianca Forte is turning lightbulb moments into bumper harvests, helping scientists fast-track their best ideas from the lab to the farm field
Filing cabinets to farm fields
Bianca Forte is on a mission to make sure great ideas don’t go to waste. At the prestigious Rothamsted Research Institute, she took on the challenge of unlocking the full potential of its scientific discoveries. Her pilot project focused on smart crop innovations led to an impressive 78 IP assets with strong commercial promise (1).
Now working full time with the crop innovation spin-out SugaROx, Bianca is supporting the development of award-winning biotech products by helping to bring science out of the lab and into the hands of farmers, where it can boost yields, strengthen resilience, and meet the urgent need for more sustainable food production.
Great ideas, going nowhere
Every year, research institutes around the world generate thousands of scientific discoveries with the potential to improve food systems, strengthen agriculture and tackle the climate crisis. But most of these innovations never leave the lab. In publicly funded organisations, especially, the gap between discovery and delivery is wide.
Promising technologies get tied up in lengthy internal reviews, under-resourced commercialisation teams, or shelved altogether due to uncertainty over which ideas are worth pursuing. Intellectual property sits idle not because it lacks value, but because there’s no clear path forward. The challenge is not invention. It’s activation.
In agriculture, this bottleneck has serious consequences. Breakthroughs in crop performance, drought tolerance or soil health are needed to tackle global challenges like food insecurity and climate change. But if they’re buried in filing cabinets or stuck in pilot mode, they can’t help anyone. Without the right systems, skills and confidence to move IP from paperwork to prototype to product, science risks stalling out before it ever reaches the farm gate.
Pipelines and power moves
Bianca Forte has played a pivotal role in reshaping how agricultural science moves from idea to impact. During her time at Rothamsted Research, she led a comprehensive review of the institute’s innovation pipeline, via the 2024 Smart Crop Protection Pilot, a £6.3M research programme funded through the UK Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. This identified 78 intellectual property assets with strong commercial potential.
Her analysis helped shift internal thinking around innovation and prompted the senior leadership team to adopt new plans for building long-term capacity in commercialisation. That strategic shift laid the groundwork for real-world impact. In fact, during her time at Rothamsted Research, Bianca raised £25M+ for open innovation and new ventures.(3)
Bianca has since joined SugaROx, a spin-out built on collaborative research between Rothamsted and the University of Oxford. Now working full-time with the biotech company, she has helped bring forward a crop treatment based on trehalose-6-phosphate (T6P), designed to improve yields and boost resilience. The product won the Innovation Prize at the Biostimulants World Congress in 2024. Her work is a clear example of how skilled leadership and strategic focus can turn research into solutions with global relevance.
Growing more than yields
Bianca has helped shift how a major publicly funded research institute connects science to real-world outcomes, and the ripple effects of her work are already reaching farms, research labs, and the broader agrifood economy. Bianca has continued to facilitate impacts at SugaROx, where wheat trials conducted across five countries have shown yield increases of up to 22 percent in optimal conditions and up to 14 percent under drought stress. For farmers, this can mean higher income per hectare and greater food security without increasing land use or water consumption.
These kinds of yield improvements don’t just boost productivity, they also help protect the planet too. Producing more food on existing farmland reduces the pressure to clear forests or expand agricultural land, while making more efficient use of water, nutrients and other inputs. Increased drought resilience also gives farmers a buffer against climate extremes, helping to stabilise food supply in the face of growing environmental volatility.
Innovations like those at SugaROx can unlock new high-value jobs in the agri-tech sector, attract investor confidence, and build momentum behind research that delivers practical results. Bianca’s own career growth reflects that shift. Her move into a full-time leadership role supports stronger talent retention, brings more women into key positions, and shows how commercial-savvy science can drive meaningful change. This is what happens when innovation reaches the right hands and fuels resilience, opportunity and long-term progress across the field.
Powered by WE Lead
Bianca’s journey from internal innovator to commercial leader was shaped in part by her participation in EIT Food’s WE Lead programme in 2019. Designed to equip women in agrifood with the tools to step into senior roles, the WE Lead programme gave Bianca the strategic mindset, commercial confidence and peer support network needed to unlock her next chapter. Rather than launching a startup herself, she focused on building systems that would help others do so more effectively, starting with the innovation pipeline at Rothamsted.
With fresh insight and strategic tools gained from EIT Food’s WE Lead programme, Bianca helped transform how the institute moves innovation forward, guiding promising technologies toward market with greater speed and focus. The programme helped her develop the skills to evaluate intellectual property through a business lens, sharpen decision-making, and map clearer paths from idea to market.
WE Lead also gave Bianca the clarity and confidence to step into a full-time leadership role at SugaROx, where she’s now turning scientific insight into scalable products. EIT Food’s support helped shift the tempo of innovation at a prestigious research institute and supported the career progression of a woman now driving that change forward.
The WE Lead Food programme gave me the commercial tools and strategic mindset I needed to move from research focus to impact focus. By working through real world frameworks and peer networks I could identify where the value was in our innovation pipeline and drive progress with purpose.
Lessons from the lab bench
- Innovation is invention and selection. Bianca’s work shows that the most impactful ideas aren’t always new. Sometimes, they’re sitting on the shelf, waiting for someone with the right lens to spot their value and move them forward.
- Leadership is about creating pathways, not always leading the charge. By improving how Rothamsted identifies and progresses IP, Bianca enabled multiple innovations to find their way to market, meaning her impact is multiplied.
- Technical knowledge needs a commercial engine. The WE Lead programme helped bridge the gap between science and strategy. Without that translation layer, even the most brilliant research can stall.
- Representation matters. Bianca’s move into a senior, full-time role in a high-growth spinout highlights the importance of women in leadership, especially in sectors where they remain underrepresented.
- Impact scales when systems are built to support it. From institutional strategy to commercial spinouts, Bianca’s journey shows how well-placed people can change how entire organisations innovate, making progress faster, smarter, and more focused on real-world outcomes.
The field is wide open
The potential for impact here is huge, and it’s only just beginning. The global biostimulants market was estimated at US$ 4.1 billion in 2024 – and projected to grow to 11.2 billion in 2034. [2]
Bianca is a great example of how targeted leadership support can do more than accelerate one person’s career. It can unlock stalled innovation, reshape institutional strategy, and directly influence the development of products with real-world, measurable benefits. Programmes like WE Lead don’t just create individual success stories; they create catalysts. Bianca is now positioned at the heart of a high-impact agri-tech company, helping steer solutions that can boost yields and build resilience in the face of climate change.
To scale this impact, we need more Biancas! And more support systems that equip women with the skills, confidence and networks to lead. That means continuing to fund and expand programmes like WE Lead, embedding them across institutions where scientific talent is abundant but under-leveraged. It also means ensuring that innovation environments recognise and reward strategic thinkers who might not fit the traditional mould of a founder, but who can make entire systems work better. The science is already there. With the right leadership, it has a fighting chance of reaching the field.
