1st Science2Society workshop: Boosting innovation efficiency across Europe

May, 2016

How can collaboration between universities, research institutions, industrial companies and the society bring the most value for Europe? By working on the EU-funded project ‘Science2Society’ the 18 partners of the consortium coming from seven countries will find the answer. The overall goal is to improve innovation processes and their effectiveness in society.
Value can be created through sparkling new ideas, capturing the benefits of publicly funded research and ultimately producing winning solutions for today’s societal challenges. However, research output often gets lost in complex innovation and economic systems before they find their way to the market.

International and cross-organizational innovation
Science2Society aims to understand the European innovation system and to identify bottlenecks between science and society. The focus is on investigating the best ways to create new businesses accelerate the time of research output to market and attract financing.
The project brings together universities, industries, research and technology organizations (RTOs) and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It is endorsed by large networks on EU-level including peers and ecosystems (e.g. EUA or EIRMA ).

The result: Good-practice guidelines for Europe
Science2Society will create, pilot and share good practices, guidelines and training material that improve the collaboration between research, industry and society. All the results will base on seven pilot projects especially affected by Open Innovation and Open Science.
The experts will elaborate good practices, which will show how cross-organizational research teams (including universities, RTO’s, industries, SMEs and the public sector) can address today’s industrial and societal challenges in the most efficient way. The focus will not only be on how to initiate and facilitate these cross-organizational teams, but also on how to reward them for sharing ideas, information and knowledge.
Dissemination throughout Europe
The consortium will disseminate the project results throughout Europe, aiming to successfully replicate the best collaboration formats to a large number of stakeholders of the European Research Arena.

Budget: EUR 2.85 M
Duration: 2016 – 2019
Consortium: 6 universities, 4 industrial partners, 5 SMEs, 3 RTOs
7 countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK)
Funding: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme

Venue: 
MESSE CONGRESS NORD, Graz (Austria)