In this post: upgrade the impact of your research by improving your connection with your local environment, with a long-term vision of building trust with knowledge-sharing communities or networks.
There are important changes underway (some notes about these changes at the end of the post) in the way universities organise themselves to produce impact, or in other words, to ensure that their knowledge production results in value for society.
Instead of one best model, there are a variety of models and structures that can work well for different universities, different departments, even researchers within the same university. We have realised that impact occurs at a variety of intersections [1]. Flexibility in the organisation of its activities, proactive support for a variety of impact cultures, facilitation of mixed communities, makes a knowledge-generating institution stronger when it comes to producing value.
With flexibility and different types of support structures available, real challenges and problems are more easily connected to possible solutions. More and better seed ideas are generated that feed into new research proposals.
This article is a discussion of what these changes in technology transfer (TT) support mean for the individual researcher and their lab, and how to take advantage of them.
The element of local interconnection. The largest structures and support programs for TT are created as top-down general programs, but changes are towards smaller specific structures. I share the opinion that there are more advantages in the decentralisation of support. Local singular connections are the most important, with great effects also at national and international levels. Most times an international collaboration comes from a local contact that connects also locally with the international partner. The search for local connections, in a proactive manner, can be the first practical tool to integrate structural changes in TT activity.
Building trust. In order to have a useful community, with which to work to generate impact, it is above all necessary to trust in the connections made. Successful knowledge exchange and impact actions invariably come from networks, especially local ones, in which trust is authentic. How is this culture of trust created in a community of people around a common purpose? How is this social capital created? By building complicity, listening a lot, putting oneself in the shoes of others as far as possible, with empathy and generosity. We can thus contribute to our colleagues, our closest contacts, feeling committed and inspired, or at least not contributing to generating demotivation and stress. In a research group, it is a good idea to have an environment of flexibility and academic freedom so that people can meet and be themselves and contribute to the group in different ways.
Share your vision and clarify expectations at different levels. With your colleagues, your bosses and the members of your laboratory, with your university services and your government institutions. Be prepared to be surprised and to change or qualify your opinion. Build a flexible community of contacts, with different priorities, varying institutional or individual identities, varying personalities and skills. By sharing your vision at various levels you will be able to improve the planning of ideas, project proposals and the state of your own lab and research activity.
Value quality rather than quantity in your production and that of other researchers. This is a change in the way of thinking about the planning of our TT activity. Not all activities or transferable results are equally important. It is a difficult change because it has only partially occur for the evaluation of research performance. However is critical for TT activities. While R&D evaluation catches up, lab PIs could create virtual spaces where the people they assess (students, other researchers) have creative opportunities where quality and excellence are prioritised over quantity, and results ready for TT have a chance to make it to market.
[1] Mark S. Reed and Ioan Fazey, Front. Sustain., 16 July 2021
Notes on institutional and structural changes in technology transfer.
There is a fundamental change underway in the way technology transfer is addressed by interested governments and institutions: universities and researchers are generators of knowledge but also intermediaries of that knowledge. The structures of interface with society in general, with companies in particular, work at a lower level than previously supported.
> In her keynote talk during the UPV Innovation day on the 1st of March 2023, Dr Alison Campbell (CEO of the new UK Government Office for Technology Transfer – GOTT) spoke of the recent change in trend in multinational companies, which now prefer to work with local contacts. In particular in the case of US companies. Dr Campbell also spoke about developments in the university spin-out creation environment, with the creation of new seed funds from central governments but also from universities themselves, and initiatives to involve students more closely in TT activities, given their growing interest in entrepreneurship and innovation. GOTT has published a government-level guide to knowledge asset management – The Rose Book. A summary of Dr Campbell’s talk is in this tweet by Carlos Ripoll.
> Universities are not the preferred partner for most companies in Spain when it comes to carrying out R&D activities [page 198 of the CYD Report on research and transfer in Spanish universities, March 2023]. With a slight increase in the percentage of innovative companies, Spain is still behind the EU average. It is very striking that in Spain companies have approximately 80% of their innovation activities in collaboration with other companies, while with universities and public research institutes they are at 15% of these activities [page 220 of the same CYD report].
> Why Spain is reindustrializing in the opposite way to Europe – article by Eugenio Mallol from February 2023 in ATLASTECH REVIEW, in which several recent reports and works on the balances between research, innovation and reindustrialization in EU countries and regions are discussed: «…even starting from similar initial structural conditions, regions can end up on different development paths, due, for example, to local innovative entrepreneurship, local institutional spirit and place-based leadership.»
> «It is urgent to promote the transfer of knowledge and, above all, to prioritize industrial research…» In this article by Xavier Ferrás, Diagnosis of R&D in Spain: insufficient progress after a lost decade, from January 2023, it is explained with data and comparing with other countries how in Spain «scientific policies have been made, but industrial policy aimed at creating economic fabric has been neglected.»
Andrés Alba-Pérez 