DL: A road map for academic research-intensive innovation from the Centre of Digital Life Norway

The ambitious goal of Centre for Digital Life Norway is to transform Norwegian biotechnology research. The centre wants to stimulate to value creation from digital biotechnology. Last year the centre was granted NOK 30 million from the Research Council of Norway to run the 5-year innovation project ?A roadmap for academic research-intensive innovation?. The objective of the innovation project is to design and initiate a change process in Norwegian universities and research institutions, with the aim to gradually increase the innovation mindset and culture among the researchers, and through that contribute to increased translation and valorisation of research findings into products or services of societal and economic value. In the first phase of the project, the goal has been to understand the situation in the digital life science and biotechnology sector in Norway ? the strengths and weaknesses ? when going from research to innovation. Last year the centre hired the international consultancy company Technopolis to help describe the current ?AS IS? situation for the Norwegian research and innovation landscape in which the centre operates. Their study is based on interviews with different actors and literature studies, and is both descriptive and diagnostic with regard to what works and not in the system. Based on the AS IS study, the innovation team in the centre has identified six domains to follow up: Research capacity, transdisciplinarity and convergence; Innovation culture in academia; Public and private funding; Idea producer?idea user links; Innovation ecosystems; and Innovation support and commercialisation. See more details on each domain at the bottom of the article. The domains address weaknesses and challenges in the Norwegian system that the project will seek solutions to. We will look at similar initiatives and organisations as the Centre for Digital Life Norway in others countries to identify lessons learnt and new innovative ways of working for us to build upon. The findings will be turned into a strategy and an action plan for the next four years with activities aiming to accelerate innovation in the digital life sciences. ? What is rather unique with this work is the collection in one study of the multiple challenges that ideas originating in an academic research project face in their path to become a service, a product or a method that benefits society at large. Probably the points we identified are not new, but their study from a systems point of view is new. Dependencies matter for a successful redesigning of academic innovation, says professor Arnoldo Frigessi at the University of Oslo (UiO). Frigessi is in charge of the innovation project and is working on the project with the coordinators for innovation and industry collaboration in the centre, Alexandra Patriksson and Beate Rygg Johnsen at the UiO. ? As a researcher doing research-based innovation myself, I have seen in person many of the bottlenecks. For me it was surprising to see how general these problems are, and how deep their roots are in our academic world. I know that researchers, young researchers especially, want to have an impact in society. To write a brilliant paper and then hope that your idea will be picked up by someone else and developed to be the thing you hoped, does not work. I think researchers want to honour their responsibility more deeply, Frigessi adds. In the second phase of the innovation roadmap project, starting in August 2021, the centre will implement the action plan. This will include pilot activities with the 35 transdisciplinary biotechnology projects in the centre. Successful pilots will be implemented in the ordinary plans of the centre.

This project will design and initiate a change process in Norwegian universities and research performing institutions, with the aim to gradually increase the innovation mindset and culture among the researchers and through that contribute to increased translation of research findings into products or services of societal and economic value. The project focuses on transdisciplinary digital biotechnology and aims to strengthen the national advantages Norway has within this field. The change process will be founded on a thorough AS IS analysis of both the current situation in Norway, existing literature and of best practice cases from outstanding academic research-based innovation organizations around the world. A gap analysis of the differences between the current situation and the desired future will be used to design a desired TO BE situation for the Norwegian academic innovation support system and develop the strategy for how to get there. The strategy will give guidance on activities that will facilitate and enforce development of research based academic innovations in the cross section of biotechnology and digitalization to innovation levels where they are mature to attract public and private funding. We envisage a strong level of creativity and current limitations will not be seen as obstacles. The strategy must give concrete advice on actions and initiatives that will help to build the organizational and cultural foundation needed in order to develop a successful innovation culture both within the academic institutions/research institutes and among the individual researchers. Phase 2 will be used to initiate the change process that has been designed through Phase 1 using Centre for Digital Life, the academic institutions of the centre and the research projects as pilot experiments defined in the action plan approved by the DLN Board.