vaikuttavuussaatio

The Finnish Research Impact Foundation will be live on Zoom every Tuesday at 1:00 pm to 1:30 pm, from 23 March through to 6 April. The live sessions are dedicated to answering applicants’ questions regarding the TIA 2021 spring call. You can send your questions in advance using this form. The Foundation’s CEO Petro Poutanen will be available to answer your questions.

Join us on Zoom! Link to Zoom Q&A sessions. Tuesdays 1:00-1:30 pm from 23 March to 6 April 2021.

A report just out by VTT Finland and Tampere University highlights a worrying trend in the Finnish RDI field.

Commissioned by the Finnish Research Impact Foundation FRIF, the report raises concerns about a slowdown in cooperation between academia and industry.

“Finland has been quite at the cutting edge compared to its European peers, but recent indicators suggest that cooperation has been on the decline and that we’ve become increasingly detached and isolated from each other,” says Arho Suominen, one of the report’s authors who works at VTT and Tampere University.

Suominen says that there are several bodies in Finland that provide funding for joint projects between the university and business sector. In recent years these joint efforts have been significantly curtailed, however.

“In the current financing environment the two sides quite simply don’t see each other as attractive partners in cooperation. Because of the scarcity of meaningful research problems and limited opportunities to achieve academic merit, research funding doesn’t give enough incentive for researchers to join forces and work together,” Suominen explains.

Based on an extensive review of the research literature and indicators of research cooperation, the report puts forward a range of new initiatives for deepening cooperation between universities and businesses.

Close collaboration between academia and business has generated significant growth and contributed to regenerate and revitalise the Finnish economy. It has long been recognized as one of the major strengths of the Finnish system compared to other European countries. Yet the momentum of this cooperation is now waning.

Over the past decade the amount and relative weight of business-funded research have continued to decline at universities across the country. This is in stark contrast to trends in other EU and OECD countries, as indicated by figures for business-funded academic research in Finland in 2000–2018 compared to the EU average (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Universities’ funding from business and industry in Finland, EU28 and OECD countries. Source: OECD, Main Science and Technology Indicators

Chairman of the FRIF Board, Mr Lauri Oksanen says that Finnish business and industry is certainly keen to undertake research cooperation and to take advantage of the unique skills and competencies and the new business generated.

“There is no doubt that both parties benefit from the coming together of research and innovation. It’s crucial that we get this cooperation back on track,” Mr Oksanen says.

Improving and intensifying cooperation between academia and industry is important so that Finland can continue to build on its key success factor – a culture of cooperation and interaction – and so that it does not fall behind international developments.

“Our research system in Finland is world-class, and we also have a very strong export industry. The obstacles to cooperation are largely structural and cultural in nature and cannot be overcome by money alone. We need to have open dialogue about the bottlenecks of cooperation and to show a true commitment to finding solutions,” Arho Suominen says.

The report makes a range of observations and suggestions about developing funding opportunities that will serve to promote cooperation. One of these observations is that rather than making funding available for individual projects, funding schemes should be specifically geared to advancing cooperation, promoting interaction and securing the continuity of cooperation.

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.