In 2011, Nokia Denmark presented a potential plan for shutting down R&D activities in Denmark with the potential loss of 1.100 jobs. Aalborg University, which was growing rapidly and had already strong collaboration with Nokia, decided to move into the Nokia buildings with the motivation of maintaining jobs and R&D activities in the ICT sector by creating an environment where researchers, students and companies lived next door to each other, which enable frequent planned and unplanned meetings between the entities. Main objectives of the initiative were to boost collaboration between the university and industry, by creating a shared space to provide both entities with fundamental facilities and services that improves the access to knowledge and facilitates co-creation, develop and sustain entrepreneurship and start-up activities, among other. After the co-location agreement, a steering committee was established that secured a close collaboration between the university’s innovation department and the Technical Services Unit, in charge of subleasing the buildings.
One of the core issues of a set-up like this is to expose the partners to each other, i.e. getting the companies to get an understanding of the university’s specialties and mode of working as well as having the researchers to identify ways of collaborating with the companies and by that putting extra dimensions to research and lectures.
This is done in many ways, but it is important to mention that even though the university is well-acknowledged within university-business collaboration, and many companies have experience in working together with HEIs, much of the work dealing with new ways of collaborate begins with relationship building. Thus many of the activities taking place consist of both bilateral meetings and collaboration (and therefore more “non-controllable”) as well as joint and shared activities such as workshops, seminars etc. The range of activities goes from one-to-one meeting among university and companies (and between companies) to more formalized events;
- One-to-one meetings between companies and the university’s researchers, the innovations department, students, other companies etc.;
- Pitch & Match; co-located companies presenting themselves for students in a dialogue based workshop to engage into student projects, master’s thesis, internships, student work (and possible later full recruiting);
- Companies presentations at lecturers presenting student projects;
- Company employees acting as guest teachers;
- Company employees attending relevant classes and courses (further education);
- Seminars exposing and presenting different aspects of AAU’s areas of expertise and research – this is also intended to break down silos internally at AAU and having different domains work together in new constellations;
- Presentations of labs, equipment etc.;
- Joint workshops and information meetings regarding EU and other funding possibilities with AAU’s Fundraising department;
- Ad hoc meeting to identify new radical ways of interaction to foster innovation (including external partners and industry);
- Joint research applications;
- (Industrial) PhD projects;
- Possibilities for participation at AAU’s Career Days for students;
A major challenge has been to undertake a university – industry collaboration not seen before, and with a business model that is difficult to handle within the framework of a public university. As the university (of course) does not have rental as one of its core products, there has been some challenges as getting alignment of the main reasons for renting out square meters to companies among the Innovation department, the academic staff, the Technical Services unit and management, especially within the question of state-subsidized efforts within the scheme securing that the university wasn’t doing anything illegal or doubtful.
On the collaboration side it has proved difficult to get a formalized and smooth collaboration running between companies, start-ups, students and researchers, even though the results and activities mentioned in the paragraphs above do prove that this is accomplished to a certain degree. The overall challenges is to create ownership for the joint efforts for the university as a whole to develop this co-location, because to this point is has been a minority of academic staff being involved in the collaboration, so there is a great need to expose the successes and good case stories internally to the researchers at the university to expand the
possibilities for collaboration – also internally between the departments to enhance further cross-disciplinary activities.
Taking responsibility for growth and job creation; co-location for co-creation. University Industry Innovation Network, 2014.
“Imperial and IBM collaborate in cognitive computing”.
The full success of the initiative still needs to be fully realized as this is a rather young initiative, but a strong focus on the legal framework of industry-university collaboration needs to be maintained, as long with a continuous evaluation of whether such an initiative pays off to the university when measuring one of our bottom lines. Key factors here will be to look at the financial implications of such an initiative, but it will also be important to measure whether the presence of an interesting and attractive study environment will attract more students and staff, or i.e. research funding from co-located companies
- A strong focus on the legal framework of industry-university collaboration needs to be maintained and a continuous evaluation on research activities, financial sustainability and the attraction potential of the co-location initiative in terms of students, staff, research funding and co-located companies.
- Expose partners to each other to understand specialties and mode of working as well as to identify ways of collaborating with the companies by promoting a wide range of activities (spontaneous and formal).
- Ensure openness and commitment to identify and take advantage of the possibilities for collaboration.
- Connect the co-location leaders with the Government by offering a systematic setup for connecting industry and academia and support for job creation and skills development through lifelong learning opportunities.
- Define and monitor all kinds of collaboration activities to support a quantitative evaluation and continuous improvement.
