CREMLIN WP8: Innovation Workshop

Research infrastructures encompass facilities, resources, and services that are used by scientific communities to conduct research and foster innovation in their fields. They act as a “testbed” for new technologies, a driver for innovation, and they provide access to industrial users.  The European Spallation Source (ESS), Sweden, organised a European-Russian Innovation Workshop within the CREMLIN project together with the NRC “Kurchatov Institute”,  Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) (Germany), and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), to explore the potential for innovation, industrial use, and technology transfer around the Russian megascience facilities and European large-scale research infrastructures – including links to the innovation system in the corresponding region.

The workshop took place on the 10^th of October at the DTU Campus, Denmark, and brought together R&D and innovation experts from European, Russian, and international platforms and initiatives. Representatives from the Russian ‘Megascience’ facilities and European large-scale facilities discussed possible ways to help strengthen the impact of their research by learning from one another how to approach the various challenges of managing innovation within the domain of their respective organisations. Representatives from the European side, namely: CERN and ESRF as well as the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and from the Russian side, among others: Moscow State University Science Park, National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Budker Institute and Institute of Applied Physics RAS gave presentations at the workshop and illustrated examples of addressing this task . 

The workshop focused on the innovation potential and industrial collaboration possibilities for the megascience projects, including industrial users, technology transfer, and links to the regional innovation system around the megascience facilities. The main outcomes of the workshop were, but not limited to, related to the need of importance of internationalisation of the RIs, closer cooperation with industry, more work mobility (including specialists from the private sphere), and training schemes to get research infrastructures closer to industry, innovation culture building, the preparation of roadmaps for key technologies, and the right use of the legal and regulatory environments.