#ENRIITCyourCoffee Season 3: Episode4 “ATTRACT EU project”

Welcome to the short recap of our fourth episode of this season. We had the pleasure of listening to Markus Nordberg, Head of Resources Development of the Development and Innovation Unit at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), together with Pablo Garcia Tello, Section Head of the CERN EU Office, developing new EU-funded projects and initiatives. Together, they coordinate the ATTRACT project.

ATTRACT is a pioneering initiative bringing together Europe’s fundamental research and industrial communities to lead the next generation of detection and imaging technologies. The aim is to create an entirely new European model of Open Innovation that can become an engine for jobs and prosperity for all. Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, the project aims to help revamp Europe’s economy and improve people’s lives by creating products, services, companies, and jobs.

Paolo Garcia Tello summarised ATTRACT and a few key points are given here:

• From serendipity to deliberate: There is innovation and fundamental research sharing happening between academia and industry, but it is rather serendipitous. ATTRACT wants to use research infrastructures to their full potential of innovation to make those collaborations deliberate and more likely to happen.
• From Open Science to Open Innovation: Today scientists’ main goal is to be published by a respectable publication while not worrying about the financial return on investment. ATTRACT wants to change that so that the research would look beyond publication and already find ways to be utilised.
• Co-innovation: Often there are solutions from academia to problems that industry partners have, and at times vice versa. This co-innovation between partners should already start from the conceptual stages. These types of relationships are built with time and trust. Research/industry relationships should not be simple customer/supplier relationships to be successful.
• Apply for money with the goal of not keeping it: This take-home message is all through Pablo’s talk and the note he finishes on.
• Many, many more that you can see for yourself in the video below.

Further, the audience asked about the next phases of ATTRACT. Pablo told us his dream of first and second phases repeating themselves, but you can see more in his presentation here.

Pablo also gave a great example of this workshop series called “Technology Trends, Wishes and Dreams” where researchers from very different disciplines come together and are deliberately not separated into breakout rooms, but rather assimilated with each other. The event had no agenda, and the extremely short presentations were determined by drawing disciplines. Our coffee went quite over time, since there were so many questions, but you can check out the recording below.

Join us for our next coffee break, like Pablo, who said that he is happy to have discovered us and ENRIITC project.

If you have a topic that interests you,s then let us know and we can make it happen for our #ENRIITCyourCoffee break! Contact us today!