Whereas in market-driven situations the private parties have an interest in driving innovations towards implementation, in the case of public concerns, it is often the public concern that initiates the innovation process. The issue for the public funding agencies is then to stimulate idea generation and the process towards implementation and impact. However, these innovation processes are complex, as they involve a multiplicity of public and private actors with different and sometimes conflicting concerns. Thus, the benefits and business cases are not immediately clear and this makes it hard to scale beyond the proof of concept. In this paper we examine and derive lessons learned based on a longitudinal case study of a series four EU-funded projects (ITAIDE, INTEGRITY, CASSANDRA and CORE) in the international trade domain that aimed to develop digital trade infrastructure solutions (data pipelines) to address security and trade facilitation challenges. For our case analysis, we adapt and extend Bryson et al.’s framework [1] on cross-sector collaborations. We show how each of these projects covered one part of the public–private innovation trajectory, moving the innovation from the Initial R&D stage, to the Showcasing and dissemination stage to attract critical mass, towards a Turning point stage when the business cases for further upscaling become visible. We identify continuities (i.e. continuity of network & vision, funding and process) as well as a number of alignments as important factors that drive collective innovation processes towards implementation and impact. Further research is needed to establish to what extent these findings are applicable in other contexts.