Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol2-1 > Innovation Collaboration - Crossing the divides

One of the clearest messages to emerge at the 1st European Innovation Summit in Brussels in October was that innovation collaboration and the way people connect has more value than technological expertise alone. Addressing an audience of 800 delegates, a glittering list of speakers from Europe’s leading high-tech companies, together with EU policy chiefs and prominent academic researchers, reiterated the theme that partnerships and innovation collaboration– between the public and private sector, individual companies, industry associations and universities – were the key to fostering EU competitiveness.

“We must share excellence in innovation – stealing with pride gets the job done quickly. Sharing brings stimulus, freshness and a creative spark,” were some of the comments from a panel discussion on Open Innovation and innovation collaboration. Several speakers highlighted the need to revitalise the entrepreneurial culture in Europe by improving linkages between business and schools and universities. They pointed out that in the US, MBA students are taught how to become entrepreneurs, with the result that more than 80% of graduates intend to develop innovative products and take them to market.

With the appointment of Máire Geoghegan-Quinn as the EU’s first commissioner for research, innovation and science and a European Innovation Act set for the autumn, innovation collaboration has risen to the top of the Brussels policy agenda. The European Commission has highlighted investment in ICT as a driver for economic recovery, focusing on sustainable development.

The European Patent Office is engaged in a major project looking at the growth in new patents for environmentally sound technologies. The study will also look at how the green patent landscape has evolved since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and examine how companies have responded to incentives and policy signals. “Greening ICT” has become a buzz word in industry circles as businesses seek to develop more environmentally friendly product lines to meet customer demand, as well as reduce their carbon footprint.

One example is the E3CAR (“Energy efficient electrical car”) project, funded in part by the EU and ENIAC (the European Nanoelectronics Initiative Advisory Council), which brings together an innovation collaboration of 33 industry and research partners from 12 countries, including the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy and Norway. Led by the German company Infineon Technologies AG, the innovation collaboration objective is the development of nanoelectronics technologies, specifically for electrical and hybrid vehicles.

Due to end in 2011, the consortium is targeting research on semiconductor components and power modules with the capacity to control the supply and distribution of power in these innovative vehicles. By increasing efficiency by more than one third (35%), the E3CAR innovation collaboration believe electric vehicles will be able to travel further using a battery unit that is the same size as the current battery baseline. The innovation collaboration plan to increase the efficiency of the power converter in order to guarantee that as much battery charge as possible is used to “drive” the vehicle instead of being lost through heat dissipation.

Total funding for the project stands at around E44m, with half of this stemming from the 33 research and industry partners, and the remaining from the EU, ENIAC and 11 funding bodies in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain.

Ultimately, the work carried out by the E3CAR innovation collaboration will fuel the advancement of technologies for environmentally friendly and energy-efficient vehicles. The innovation collaboration project will help the EU meet its targets for developing green technologies, curbing carbon emissions and reducing fossil fuel liquids consumption.

Ageing population

The social and economic implications of an ageing population have also prompted innovation collaboration projects. The CAALYX (Complete ambient assisting living experiment) project, co-ordinated by the Spanish company Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, is an innovation collaboration project designed to help elderly people stay in their own homes.

It draws on a number of technologies, including Global Positioning (GPS), TV and video, an adapted version of a Wii controller, a smart mobile phone developed in Portugal and a mobility monitoring system from the University of Limerick in Ireland. The aim is to put together an integrated home-monitoring system and caretaker centre, which can keep an eye on vulnerable people at home and provide personalised care.

The mobile system will be used to collect five different vital signs and can detect falls as well as potential health alerts. Data is transmitted to a caretaker centre where it can be accessed by doctors, caretakers or family members.

The CAALYX innovation collaboration team received more than E1.8m in funding from the EU and has launched two follow-up projects to help bring the technology to the market.

Another global health problem with far-reaching social and economic consequences is being tackled by four consortia of scientists and industrialists, working together to fight the seasonal flu virus, which kills an estimated 250,000-500,000 people worldwide each year.

In total, the innovation collaboration of 52 research institutes and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from 18 European countries, as well as China, Israel and the US, will work together on four projects to determine how influenza virus genes migrate, and how they pose a threat to the well-being of humans and animals. In less than a decade, the Commission has earmarked more than E100m for research on influenza.

The funding granted to two of the four consortia will help develop innovative drugs that can fight influenza in humans, while the other two consortia will investigate influenza in pigs.

FLUPIG will determine how to best understand the involvement of pigs in influenza pandemics. Knowledge about this will help experts determine methods to better control influenza pandemics in the future. The drugs developed by FLU-PHARM will help mitigate the threat of influenza to patients by reducing the risk of developing resistance to drugs and easing potential side effects. If their results are successful, the FLU-PHARM innovation collaboration will offer new opportunities for treating seasonal and pandemic flu. This project expects to receive E6m in financial support.

The FLU-PHARM innovation collaboration are from Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Austria, Slovakia and Sweden, while the FLUPIG partners are from Belgium, China (Hong Kong), Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the UK and the US.

The breakdown of the EU funding for each innovation collaboration project, as well as their details will be determined when the signing of contracts takes place in 2010. The call for proposals for new research projects on influenza was launched last July, and 17 proposals were submitted.

Architecture for research

Considerable progress has been made in the development of the architecture for innovative research at the European level. For example, Joint Technology Initiatives (JTI) are a way of co-ordinating public-private partnerships to achieve critical mass of research in key areas of economic importance for European competitiveness. The aim is to support large-scale initiatives that could not be implemented efficiently, using the other R&D funding mechanisms.

A JTI focuses on one specific industrial area, has a well-defined objective, addresses a market failure and is funded by a innovation collaboration of private and public investments. It is hoped that JTIs will make Europe a more attractive location for inward investment in research.

The first five fields of research are already active:

• Fuel Cells and Hydrogen (FCH)
• Aeronautics and Air Transport (Clean Sky)
• Innovative Medicines (IMI)
• Nanoelectronics Technology 2020 (ENIAC)
• Embedded Computing Systems (ARTEMIS)

In each case, the JTI is part-funded by the EU, the member states and industry. The ARTEMIS JTI, for example, was set up in 2008 with a budget of E2.7bn, with the support of Nokia, Philips, Thales, ST Microelectronics and DaimlerChrysler and 18 member states. It will run until 2017. The aim is to help European industry consolidate and reinforce its world leadership in embedded computing technologies. Embedded computers, found in everyday devices such as mobile phones, cars and aeroplanes, represent more than 90% of total computing devices and are forecast to grow to 40 billion devices by 2020. The economic impact in terms of jobs and growth is expected to exceed E100bn over the next 10 years.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative JTI was set up in 2007 to boost biomedical innovation in Europe. The aim of the innovation collaboration is not to develop new medicines, but to streamline their development. The drug-development process, from discovery of the molecule through to final clinical trials, takes an average of 12 years, at a cost of E800m. The problem is that their potential secondary effects and efficacy are not known until the last stage of this process and if there is a problem, development has to stop.

The IMI concept is simple: if pharmaceutical companies agree to share information on their various failures, there will be fewer such failures, saving both time and money. The consortium is co-financed by the European Community and the pharmaceutical industry.

The Clean Air Initiative, which was founded by an innovation collaboration of 86 members, including 12 large aeronautics companies, the European Community and 74 diverse associate organisations, is built on six technical areas designed to improve greening and competitiveness. The aim is to reduce CO2 aviation emissions by 20-40%, NOx by 60% and perceived noise by 20 decibels by 2020. First test flights of some of the innovative green aircraft are expected in 2012, to be followed in 2014 by successful prototypes whose results can be exploited by aeronautics companies.

The importance of such cross-border innovation collaboration was endorsed by EU Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn in her keynote address to the Lisbon Council’s 2010 Innovation Summit in March. Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn sees research and innovation collaboration as core components of the EU’s new Europe 2020 strategy and pledged to establish better infrastructure for research and development in the European Research Area (ERA).

She promised to simplify the financial and administrative procedures that prevent researchers from moving freely between countries, saying that progress is also needed on the European patent and new “European Innovation Partnerships”, part of the Europe 2020 strategy.

 

Case for innovation collaboration

Another form of innovation collaboration is taking place in Poland, where 10 R&D Institutes have formed an innovation collaboration consortium now known as Technology Partners. The skills of the consortium span a wide range, from nanotechnology and information technology to computing, electronics, optics, materials, metal processing, metal forming, and so on. They cover 1,500 researchers, 900 projects and a turnover of e100m a year. The initiative began when Poland was preparing for EU accession, when Richard Granger, who is now President of the Brussels office of Technology Partners. was advising the Polish government on industrial restructuring.

At a seminar in Provence in January 2010, Granger described innovation collaboration with how one client was working with Technology Partners on a number of projects. “At the moment, Airbus has four projects running plus a number in the feasibility stages and further up the pipeline, in the proposal stage,” he said. But he explained that Airbus was also using its investment in offshore R&D in an unusual way – to gain access to the Polish supply chain. In other words, as well as developing new technologies, Airbus was using its relationship with the consortium to build contacts with companies able to supply products it needs for its aerospace programme.

Granger said that his experience with Technology Partners also highlights the challenge of finding innovation collaboration partners. With this in mind, the Polish government is funding a programme to build a “Yellow Pages” type database of competence together with internet portals which will help researchers themselves and potential partners from around the world to find out what’s going on.

The social networking site will not only enable researchers to work more closely with colleagues in other laboratories, it will also allow Airbus and other clients to communicate directly with the researchers. “One of the most important things we need to address in trying to build a true open innovation collaboration community, is enabling easy communication between researchers in the various laboratories which form the innovation network,” Granger explained. “Trying to borrow from things that are going on in social networking in the world at large seems to me to be an interesting experiment.”