Science2Society publishes Policy Brief and guides to support innovation learning
12 November 2018
After two years of extensive research in 7 pilots experimenting with different University-Industry-Society (UIS) interfacing strategies and methods, Science2Society (S2S) have published their findings.
Now you can freely access the S2S Policy brief and Blueprints: a wealth of information to support the ongoing innovation learning process. Their blueprints are step-by-step guides for setting up a UIS interaction mechanism in the field of Open Innovation. Each blueprint includes a detailed process overview of the interaction mechanism, followed by relevant insights (e.g. characteristics of the innovation actors, enabling elements, challenges and tips) and the most important findings and recommendations.
Below are a few of the findings:
Use a step-wise approach to let small companies build an innovative DNA:
start with small projects with part-time person/months from universities and gradually build to larger projects or have gradual projects.
One of the most frequent hindrances is poor usability of online collaboration tools (e.g. failures in document versioning).
Academics are less motivated by applied research, as they are normally not rewarded by conducting applied research. In fact, it hinders their academic progression as research throughout is significantly impacted due to the increased workload.
Feedback from industry has to be from “one voice” so that the students don’t have to face divergent opinions, leading to problems in decision-making.
From an industrial perspective, the tool could evolve into the best place to identify centres of excellence, startups etc., which are currently performing state-of-the-art research and/or developing new concepts that could be converted into real product innovation opportunities.
If the research data published by a researcher is used by others, it should be equally merited as references made for peer-reviewed articles.
Having an engagement process that is time efficient, has a clear logic between data input, data output and decisions and requires minimum pre-work from the participants.
The S2S consortium is made up of 18 beneficiaries, among which are major companies and leading European research entities.
Science2Society is always looking for practitioners who want to share their experiences with the European innovation community. If you want to contribute your case, method or tool to the Science2Society Knowledge database, please contact them.
