A highly renowned consortium worked on a major project to improve innovation processes and their effectiveness in society. Titled ‘Science2Society’, the EU-funded project assessed the mechanisms through which universities, research organisations, society and industry collaborate to create value. Value in terms of:
• sparking new ideas
• differentiating new products and services
• captured benefits of publicly funded research
• appealing new talent
• winning solutions for todays’ societal challenges
The consortium consists of 18 participating organisations which are based in seven European countries: Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. The 3-year project directly engaged with numerous universities and research organisations, industries and small businesses across Europe.
Accelerating Innovation: The overall mission of Science2Society is to understand and improve the efficiency of the European innovation system and the ways it creates new businesses, turns technology into products and services, attracts financing and generally creates value from academic research.
The study focused on key schemes currently used to encourage use of innovation. These include inter alia co-creation of products in a virtual ‘ideas laboratory’, co-location of industry laboratories in universities as well as coaching and training provided by universities to SMEs. To optimise for instance such coaching and training, the current typical knowledge transfer process was mapped, the steps and tasks that appeared the most problematic were identified, possible solutions explored and guidelines on how to streamline University-SME knowledge transfer created.
Outrun innovation systems outside Europe: More specific objectives include compiling an easily accessible knowledge database of university / industry / society interface schemes suitable for today’s more open environment; the creation of a clear and proven set of guidelines and tools; and developing a sustainable learning programme for continued replication of the best schemes. This last objective has a critical mass of European stakeholders and therefore has a substantial impact throughout Europe.
Shaping the European Research Arena: Backed with a total budget of € 2.85M (2016-18), Science2Society not only collected knowledge and models; it deeply and innovatively analysed how these can be improved (using advanced methods pioneered in business practice such as process re-engineering, design thinking and change management) and ran substantial experiments to validate the created optimized interfacing schemes.
Science2Society disseminated its results throughout Europe, aiming to successfully replicate the best university / industry / society collaboration programmes to a large number of stakeholders.
Joint forces for “I to P” – Innovation to Product: The project brings together both practitioners and, as method and system experts, universities, industries, research and technology organizations and SMEs. The project is endorsed by large (EU-level) networks of peers and the innovation ecosystem.
