#ENRIITCyourCoffee Season 3: Episode 5 "Innovation impact of RIs through supplier relationships"

Welcome to the short recap of our fifth episode of this #ENRIITCyourCoffee season on May 6th and last before a little break from our coffee meetups. This episode was led by Prof. Jason Li-Ying, Director of Research and Education at the Centre for Technology Entrepreneurship at Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He was joined by Dr. Nikolaj Zangenberg, Director at Danish Technological Institute (DTI) and Danish ILO for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and XFEL, and Dr. Søren Bang Korsholm, Senior Scientist at DTU and Danish ILO for Fusion for Energy (F4E) and ITER.

Jason was kind to share and elaborate on his research into innovation impacts and how that impact is created through the supplier relationship with the Research Infrastructures (RIs). In a broader sense this topic leads to a larger socio-economic impact, which affects us all, in- and outside of RIs. In a nutshell, Jason’s work tries to explain how supplier innovation occurs while being contracted by a Big Science Organisation (BSO) and after the contract ends. Jason’s research used the European Spallation Source (ESS) data and supplier interaction as the basis data for his paper, which is currently in publication.

His presentation focused on the below main points:

Building on previous data – Jason’s team’s research built on cross-sectional internal data from ESS, previous EU projects and two surveys sent out to suppliers and WP leaders. He emphasised how important the surveys were. In many cases, after a project finishes, there is rarely any follow-up with suppliers and this spill-over effect can get lost.
Outcomes for suppliers – An especially noteworthy figure Jason presented, is the proportion of highly customised or completely new technologies/services provided by the suppliers. This makes up the vast majority of the supplied services and products for ESS. The simplified mechanism is such: suppliers work with RIs > they finish a contract > they have improved marked and technical knowledge. What happened to provide this outcome?
The BSO and supplier modes in the BSO and supplier interaction sphere and the supplier evolution sphere – this is the core model of the publication of Jason and his co-authors. The publication is still in the review phase, but listen how Jason explains the model in the episode recording from 11 minutes 27 seconds onwards in the below video.
Innovation modes and their solutions with best practices – Jason provided a lightspeed summary of a three-page long table of the innovation modes from his paper and the problem solvers with recommended best practices. As mentioned this was vert brief, but we are certain Jason can elaborate more on that when given more time than our 30 minute coffee ENRIITCment.
Much more – see the video below to get the details.

In this episode we were fortunate to have Dr Sonia Utermann and Pardeep Ghosh who are working on this exact topic. The questions posed by Sonia and Pardeep were insightful and really touched the topic in its core. See our coffee discussion yourself from the recording below.

We welcome you to join the discussion at our next #ENRIITCyourCoffee on new EU Strategy on Technology Infrastructures. The session will be led by Muriel Attané, Senior EU public Affairs Professional and EARTO Secretary General. It will take place on Thursday, 3 June, exceptionally from 10:30 to 11:00 CEST. Read more here. Rgistration is open here.