Welcome to the recap of the #ENRIITCyourCoffee season 4 episode 9, dedicated to learn more about how KTI (Knowledge Transfer Ireland) oversees the knowledge transfer community and plays a key role in bringing predictability into the business of engagement between industry and the research base.

The episode was hosted by Siobhan Horan, KTI Industry and Partner Engagement, who opened the session by giving an overview about Knowledge transfer in Ireland, highlighting its main aim which is to simplify as for industry as well as for entrepreneurs the process to benefit from Irish research and expertise. In this sense, KTI oversees the Knowledge transfer system and ensures it is in line with international best practice.

Siobhan also focused on the transparency matter that KTI wants to bring to the Knowledge Transfer system, that’s why all the outputs resulting from the commercialization with the research system are published.

Furthermore, KTI has a central role within the innovation ecosystem in Ireland, working very closely with investors, universities, research infrastructures, associations, researchers, funders, industries and all those who operate among this environment, in order to support and facilitate the interaction between them.

In Ireland, the main funding into the Knowledge Transfer offices is represented by the TTSI program (Technology Transfer Strengthening Initiative), which originally consisted of 34.5 million euros invested on a 5 years basis (2017 – 2021). Currently, it has been extended for an additional year, and it keeps on encouraging through KTI the collaboration between business, the research system and technology transfer offices: all of them have to apply to the TTSI program as consortium partners, that allow them to share knowledge expertise together with commercialization expertise, which make smaller institutes able to benefit from the larger offices and universities.

Siobhan also focused on the “Practical Guidance for enterprise engagement”, which is one of the main facilities that KTI offers to industries: it consists in a real guide covering several topics, such as confidentiality agreement, materials transfer, intellectual property, legal issues, collaborative research agreements and more. The document is constantly updated and implemented and is publicly available on KTI website.

Furthermore, KTI offers the following:

• A Search facility to find the right research experts, a very useful tool for companies and industries who might not have an existing relationship with universities, but want to find the right academic with skills needed for their ongoing research projects.
• An RD&I funding search, that brings together features from RD&I guide, states support from the government agencies and European funding, by helping the companies to input the stage of development they are, giving them a specific list of all the types of support which might be available according to their structure.

Siobhan concluded her presentation and an interactive Q&A session started after that. If any further questions or clarification concerning KTI might be needed, you can reach out to Siobhan via Siobhan.horan@knowledgetransferireland.com or visit the website www.knowledgetransferireland.com.

Here it can be found KTI presentation!

The recording of the session can be viewed in full below.

© Physicsworld.com

Delegates at a recent Big Science Summit in Malmö, Sweden, discussed how best to boost the economic impact of Europe’s research facilities.

How can Europe’s large-scale research facilities better engage with the industrial R&D community? That was the central question preoccupying delegates attending the Big Science Summit held in Malmö, Sweden, in November 2021, which featured talks and workshops within the broader TechConnect Europe Innovation Conference and
Expo. The summit brought together applied scientists and engineers working on emerging technologies with industry experts from Europe’s top-tier laboratories such as the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden, the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France, and DESY in Hamburg, Germany.

One of the headline themes addressed at the meeting was how to lower the barriers so that small and medium-sized businesses, as well as established technology companies, see Europe’s large-scale research facilities as a natural extension of their own R&D and innovation efforts. “There’s work to do on both sides,” Dalia Yablon, senior adviser
and technical programme chair of the TechConnect conference, told Physics World. “The big science labs, for their part, need to reduce obsta-cles to access in terms of bureau-cracy, cost and the current low success rate for proposals received from industry.”

The industry perspective

While many speakers pushed for an “enhanced and shared understanding” between big science and industry, others noted that significant Building bridges between big science and industry progress is already being made. The Danish advanced materials company CTS Ceramics, for example, offered a case study in what’s called “upstream innovation”. Since 2014 it has been collaborating with the CERN particle-physics laboratory near Geneva to co-develop a custom line of piezoelectric actuators. “As a result of this innovation partner-ship, CTS is now a preferred supplier and selling its technology solution to CERN,” notes Nikolaj Zangenberg, work package leader for the
European Network for Research Infrastructures and Industry for Collaboration (ENRIITC) and innovation manager at the Danish Technological Institute.

Since its formation in January 2020, ENRIITC has emerged as something of an engine-room for collaboration between large-scale science facilities and industry. With nearly 400 network members – including more than 80 industry experts from Europe’s big science labs and the university research sector – ENRIITC’s goal is to accelerate the societal and economic impact of federal and pan-European research programmes. “Our members work together to map industry as a supplier and a user of Europe’s large-scale research infrastructures,” adds Anne-Charlotte Joubert, ENRIITC project co-ordinator and a grants officer at the ESS.

Read more here!

© ESO

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have revealed the closest pair of supermassive black holes to Earth ever observed. The two objects also have a much smaller separation than any other previously spotted pair of supermassive black holes and will eventually merge into one giant black hole.

Located in the galaxy NGC 7727 in the constellation Aquarius, the supermassive black hole pair is about 89 million light-years away from Earth. Although this may seem distant, it beats the previous record of 470 million light-years by quite some margin, making the newfound supermassive black hole pair the closest to us yet.

Supermassive black holes lurk at the centre of massive galaxies and when two such galaxies merge, the black holes end up on a collision course. The pair in NGC 7727 beat the record for the smallest separation between two supermassive black holes, as they are observed to be just 1600 light-years apart in the sky. “It is the first time we find two supermassive black holes that are this close to each other, less than half the separation of the previous record holder,” says Karina Voggel, an astronomer at the Strasbourg Observatory in France and lead author of the study published online today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Read more here.