vaikuttavuussaatio

The Board of Directors of the Finnish Research Impact Foundation (FRIF) decided in its December 15, 2020 meeting to choose a team from the University of Helsinki to study and assess the effectiveness of the funding model of the Foundation. The study will be targeted at the two-year Tandem Industry Academia collaboration projects funded by the Foundation in the spring of 2020, each of which involved an industrial partner.

The Tailored Metrics for Measuring Industry–Academia Funding Programme (TAILOMETRICS) project, funded in the call that closed in November, develops an evaluation system to measure and forecast the impact of FRIF joint research projects. Along with traditional indicators for assessing research impact, the project studies alternative impact indicators such as new themes for research, innovations, and social networks.

“The indicators for measuring impact are underdeveloped. For example, social contacts – both official and unofficial ones – are essential in terms of long-term impact yet are rarely studied systematically”, says Nina Kahma, a Docent from the Centre for Consumer Society Research of the University of Helsinki and the principal investigator in charge of the project.

“Research and industry have been rather far from each other, and researchers measure results by the number of peer-reviewed publications for example. If the impact of a study is reduced to these indicators, it does not bring up where and how scientific knowledge could be put to good use”, Kahma says.

The project aims not only at assessing the impact of funded research projects but also at describing and establishing what forms the impact of research may assume.

“It is important to increase interaction between the research world and business companies. Various exchanges between academia and applied work help scientific knowledge and researchers to gain access in companies for instance and will lead, in the long run, in more interesting research and better innovations. What research is and what it could generate outside a university is worth active consideration”, Kahma says.

Effectiveness under scrutiny

The objective of the Finnish Research Impact Foundation is to set out to assess the effectiveness of its own funding model without prejudice while wishing to promote knowledge about research impact and to create visibility for various models of cooperation. The call aimed at finding not only a group of impact researchers of a high academic standard but also a genuinely innovative way of intensive research.

“The mission of our foundation is to promote the impact of research. The shoemaker’s children must not go barefoot. That is, we wish to subject the effectiveness of the Foundation’s own work to critical assessment”, says Juha Teperi, a member of the Board of Directors and one of the initiators of the call.

“We are thrilled with the cooperation that is about to start and look forward to the results. While we will put them to good use in developing our own funding activities, we will also be only too happy to share their essence with other funders and research organizations for their benefit as well”, Teperi says.
The mission of the FRIF is to strengthen cooperation between world-class research and industrial stakeholders and thus to increase the impact of top research. In its first call for applications in the spring of 2020, the Foundation funded 11 joint academic and industrial research projects in which post doc researchers work in an academic organization for one year of funding and in a business company for the other year.

FRIF to announce new funding calls – Call for impact assessment proposals to open in autumn 2020

The Board of the Finnish Research Impact Foundation has decided to launch a new funding call for proposals on research impact assessment. In addition, the Board has decided to rerun in spring 2021 the Tandem Industry Academia call that was held for the first time earlier this year.

Mr Lauri Oksanen, Chairman of the FRIF Board, opened the virtual ceremony for the announcement of the Foundation’s first-ever grant recipients on 16 September 2020. He took the opportunity to describe the mission of the newly established foundation and also outlined its plans for upcoming funding calls.

Mr Oksanen said the foundation’s role is to enhance the impact of research in Finland, especially in relation to business and industry. Finnish universities and research institutes produce a great deal of world-class research, and it is the foundation’s goal to further strengthen the impact of that work.

“We’re not just adding small amounts to the already substantial volume of basic research funding, but we are specifically committed to enhancing the impact of research,” Oksanen said.

Rerun of Tandem Industry Academia call scheduled for spring 2021

Under its first-ever funding call Tandem Industry Academia, FRIF awarded funding to 11 research projects jointly undertaken by research organisations and business companies. The call was held in spring 2020.

“Our funding is not intended as one-way support mechanism. We don’t just want to support the way that companies can benefit from leading-edge research, but also how companies can contribute to and boost the basic research that is done at universities and research institutes. It’s a two-way process of mutual benefit,” Oksanen stressed.

Given the positive response to the call, the FRIF Board has decided to rerun the funding call in spring 2021. Further information regarding the call will be made available on the FRIF website and through the Foundation’s newsletter and social media channels.

New call for research impact assessment to open in the autumn

FRIF is furthermore planning to promote awareness about different mechanisms and funding models for supporting the impact of research. In autumn 2020, the Foundation will be opening a call for proposals on an impact assessment project to monitor and follow-up the impact of research funded by FRIF itself. The purpose is to set up a multi-year project under a team specialising in research impact assessment with a view to gauging the impact of the Foundation’s funding. The call will be opened in October-November 2020; check the FRIF website for further information.

The Foundation will also be funding a report to compile the best up-to-date knowledge about funding sources available for supporting research impact. The results will be made publicly available in early 2021.

Watch Lauri Oksanen’s speech at the Grant Recipients’s celebration.

Niklas von Weymarn, the CEO of the Metsä Spring innovation company, and Ilkka Kilpeläinen, the professor of organic chemistry at the University of Helsinki, have been partners at work for more than a decade already. They share a passion for developing a new, ecologically sustainable, and economically effective way to make textile fibre from wood.

Even though the process for making viscose, the best-known wood-based textile fibre, is already more than a hundred years old, the burden and limited nature of cotton fibre production among other factors have especially in the last years opened up new possibilities for wood-based textile fibres on a growing market. Von Weymarn and Professor Kilpeläinen have faced the challenge of making the process as ecological as possible while also commercially viable, that is, sufficiently cost-effective. On the other hand, wood-based textile fibre would be a new export product for the Finnish forest industry which would, correspondingly, elevate the added value to be gained in Finland.

“From the academic point of view, the challenge was, of course, to develop a solvent that would be efficient and safe yet sufficiently cheap and recyclable too”, Kilpeläinen says.

The road to innovation is, however, a very long one and its final outcome is the result of many phases of cooperation.

“For us, it all started in 2006 when we succeeded in dissolving sawdust into organic salt. When I gave a lecture on the subject, the Metsä Fibre research director at the time came to tell me that the process is a very interesting one and asked if it could be brought to the market in a year’s time already. I replied that if that were the case I would not be here giving a lecture. Cooperation started, however, and the first seven years went wondering about things until the first breakthrough came in 2014 and we made some headway”, Kilpeläinen tells.

In 2012, Metsä Group had already launched its own development programme, which is when von Weymarn also moved from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd to Metsä Group.

“After much searching, we found our own direction, began looking for a companion in the textile market, and found Itochu, a Japanese corporation, in 2014. In 2018, we decided, together with Itochu, to invest in a test plant. For that, a new joint venture was established. The test plant built in Äänekoski is now in its launching stage”, von Weymarn tells.

At present, the textile fibre project belongs to a Metsä Group innovation company called Metsä Spring created in 2018 which is when von Weymarn came to take it over. The project carried out in the framework of the joint venture is tasked with proving the functionality of a technology that makes textile fibre out of paper-grade pulp in an environmentally-friendly way.

On the track of the value of research

Before one can even begin to consider investing in a first commercial production plant, the production process must be fine-tuned and several kinds of new know-how must be developed in parallel while research must be made into how the market will receive the new product. In the best case, the commercialization of research impressively highlights the value of academic research.

“It is typical for new production processes that their upscaling from the lab to a commercial scale takes place gradually. This is how the risks related to a new process are managed. As things stand, the test plant stage now underway is the last phase before the actual commercialization”, von Weymarn says.

“For universities, the greatest challenge is to understand the real value of research, that is, to grasp the entire scope of what it can be applied on. After all, we too could have just published our own invention in a scientific journal, but to communicate this phenomenon to parties that, in turn, may understand what can be done with the findings is already important in itself. It is not about commercial thinking only. The point is to find the right people who understand the value of an invention and are able to open up gateways to industrial cooperation for example”, Kilpeläinen says.

Genuine interaction as a requisite for the innovation process

Structures that support and create cooperation are central means in supporting innovativity. Sustained cross-border cooperation is required. An innovation process is not a clearly linear one; instead, basic research and industrial research are simultaneously active processes between which there must be cooperation.

“It is essential for Finland that we have spearhead competence in selected fields. This is how interest is generated among other parties in us as a country in terms of both our research teams and the companies in the field. Creating spearheads requires sustained efforts in academic research which is, correspondingly, ensured by sufficient funding. I also find it important that companies take an adequate part in guiding this kind of research for example”, von Weymarn states.

“From the universities’ point of view, it must be understood that cooperation is not a service but a genuine interaction between researchers and those who put various kinds of knowledge to use. Researchers need more in the way of a vision as to all the value that research results may entail. On the other hand, what is required from industry is a long-term commitment since innovations based on basic research take time, and it is not necessarily even a matter of money but of commitment to a joint development and to a shared objective”, Kilpeläinen says.

Public research funding plays a significant part in the background of successful products and solutions. It may support and boost the birth of active cooperation between academia and business.

“However, funding in itself does not guarantee innovations. At its best, it promotes the partners’ willingness to jointly understand the problem at hand and to come up together with a functional and also commercially viable solution by combining various kinds of know-how”, the director of the Confederation of Finnish Industries Riikka Heikinheimo says.

Heikinheimo has been active in a number of various duties in promoting cooperation between Finnish research and industry. She has taken part in making decisions on the funding for the research cooperation behind the bioproducts of the oil-refining company Neste for example.

“There were a strong vision of the future and a willingness to try out new things behind the project. There was also the ability to take risks boosted by public funding. At a later stage, the responsibility for the development moved to the company that has paid back the support it was provided many times over as taxes”, Heikinheimo says.

The Finnish Research Impact Foundation’s objectives are to increase the impact of cutting-edge research and to improve connections with industrial life, with an increased cooperation between the enterprises and academic research organizations as its central aim. The Foundation’s recent Tandem Industry Academia call is a case in point.

“I would say that feeding curiosity and encouraging cooperation are the main factors behind the creation of the Finnish Research Impact Foundation”, Heikinheimo says.

Many new products and services have had their background in active research cooperation. The role of research is a difficult one to see afterwards since the products are often made by companies for other companies yet examples are found in pharmacies as well as on the milk and bread shelves of shops.

“Cooperation between experts of different branches is often part of the background of successful products and new inventions. There is strength in bringing together different approaches. Demand for multidisciplinary cooperation keeps increasing when global challenges are observed. It is important, however, to understand that the problems are not only academic ones. Instead, bringing research findings to the market and launching production are equally enormous challenges”, Heikinheimo says.

FRIF awards two million euros in funding to support joint industry-academia projects

Under its first ever call for proposals, the Finnish Research Impact Foundation has awarded 2 million euros to fund research projects in which universities and research institutes join forces with business and industry. The Tandem Industry Academia call invited applications for leading-edge projects that would achieve a significantly enhanced impact through their connection and cooperation with industry. The research projects span timely topics from the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions to quantum computing and better predictive testing of cancer medicine.

The Foundation received 92 strong and competitive applications by the call deadline on 30 April, and the Board decided to award funding to 11 of them. The projects are all at the international cutting edge in their fields, and all stand to benefit from their cooperation with business and industry. The industry partners are Finnish-based companies of different sizes. The projects involve precompetitive research aimed at promoting the practical applicability of research results.

“We’re delighted with the strength of the applications we received, and the decisions were not easy to make. We’ll be keen to see what kind of impact these projects will be able to generate. Cutting-edge research offers huge untapped potential,” says Chairman of the FRIF Board, Mr Lauri Oksanen.

The idea of Tandem Industry Academia funding is that a postdoc researcher who has earned their doctorate works in a research project for one year in an academic organization and for one year in closer cooperation with the partner company. The aim is to encourage not only an exchange of ideas and knowledge, but also to increase mobility and to create new networks between academia and business companies.

“The research projects will be working to enhance the impact of science, while the role of the business partners is to make available their expertise, resources and research environments. The expectation is that the projects will inspire cross-border movement of new knowledge, skills and competencies and in this way promote both scientific and economic interests,” Oksanen says.

For further information on the projects funded, please visit the FRIF website at:
https://www.vaikuttavuussaatio.fi/en/funded-projects/

The Finnish Research Impact Foundation was launched in spring 2019 by the Finnish government. It was given an initial capital stock of 60 million euros. The mission of FRIF is to promote the impact of Finnish cutting-edge research by strengthening the connection and cooperation between academia and industry.

Further information

Lauri Oksanen Chairman of the FRIF Board tel. + 358 50 584 2143 lauri-oksanen@outlook.com

Petro Poutanen FRIF Managing Director tel. +358 40 767 1631 petro.poutanen@vaikuttavuussaatio.fi

The Finnish Research Impact Foundation’s first-ever call for funding applications was announced in an online networking event on 13 March 2020. Addressing a predominantly remote audience because of the coronavirus pandemic, Chairman of the Board Mr Lauri Oksanen described the foundation’s main aim and role, i.e. to achieve greater impact from research excellence:

“The Finnish Research Impact Foundation’s mission is not so much to produce completely new research, but rather to find ways of boosting the impact of all high level research, especially with a view to strengthening Finnish business and industry and Finnish competitiveness in general,” Mr Oksanen said.

“Joint research ventures are always a major risk, especially for smaller companies, and this is one of the barriers we hope to be able to lower through new funding models. Furthermore, the foundation will be working to create new contacts by supporting and promoting networking and by showcasing examples of effective cooperation – via both good experiences and bad,” Mr Oksanen continued.

In the first call for funding applications, FRIF highlighted the need for increased mobility between industry and academia. To this end the foundation launched the Tandem Industry Academia call for applications, which is intended to support joint projects between research organizations and business companies. As well as promoting the impact of high level research, it is hoped and anticipated that the projects funded will have a wider and longer term impact in terms of deepening industry-academia cooperation.

The call for applications closed on 30 April 2020 and attracted great interest. The FRIF Board will discuss and decide on the timing of the next call once it has accumulated more experience about current projects and processes.