European research network works to boost technology transfer in computing
October 23, 2013 - Many universities and research institutes have developed massive amounts of IP in government-funded research programs or PhD research. Some of this IP eventually ends up in real products or services, but much of it never gets applied. This is unfortunate, because some of these innovations could lead to profitable products or services in the market, alongside new jobs opportunities. How can we encourage more ideas and discoveries coming out of research to be used in industry? This challenge was the goal of the HiPEAC Industry Partner Program (HIPP) day held earlier this month in Tallinn, Estonia. The event was geared towards advertising various programs and channels for technology transfer in the European Union. An additional focus was to promote the visibility of small companies and their success stories, while encouraging others to pursue technology transfer. The event presented three new initiatives to support and promote technology transfer and innovation in computing systems, at a total investment of 80 M€ for the next three years. The first initiative is the HiPEAC Technology Transfer awards program. “By creating an award to celebrate the uptake of research results by industry, we hope to encourage researchers to transfer their technology outside the research lab,” noted Koen De Bosschere, coordinator of the HiPEAC network. “This award is to technology transfer what a best paper award is to scholarly publishing.” The program will involve approximately 20 awards per year. Another initiative known as TETRACOM, short for Technology Transfer in Computing Systems, is the first EU program to focus on helping innovators in computing systems get their ideas ready for adoption in the marketplace. As explain by coordinator Rainer Leupers, “Our goal is to encourage technology transfer and to help researchers get funding for technology transfer with an existing company. We aim for up to 50 technology transfer projects in the next three years.” I4MS, short for ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs, was presented by Ioannis D. Bitsios of the European Commission, who presented the EU’s vision for Horizon 2020. “I4MS is an EU program targeted at helping jumpstart small companies from the ‘just a few’ customers stage to the point where they have tens of customers,” he explained. “This change in status is known as ‘passing the chasm’, and tends to be a point at which many companies fail.” The new program is targeted at helping SMEs get through this fragile period by promoting the early adoption of new technologies. The program aims to adopt 150 cases. About HiPEAC The HiPEAC network is an FP7 project which gathers more than 1000 researchers in computing systems in Europe. It is the biggest such network in the world, offering training, mobility support, dissemination services, and abundant networking facilities to its members. The yearly budget of the network is about 1 M Euro. The third session of HiPEAC started on January 2012, and will run until December 2015. It is run by a consortium of six universities, one research institute and five companies. It is coordinated by Ghent University. See also www.hipeac.net.
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