Category Archives: business collaboration

Benefit from our impact and business collaboration services

|

University of Helsinki (UH) offers great research-business collaboration services. Services are provided by the experts located at Research Services. See our team from here.

During the past several years the business collaboration team has created and piloted many new type of services. The University of Helsinki doesn’t have a long history of supporting services under this category so the team has had a great opportunity to create most of the services from scratch.

From the picture below you can see what we did at year 2018. Overall guideline for our work is the UH’s current strategy. We work towards the goals:

• Co-operation with companies increases
• Research has high societal impact
• Joint research with stakeholders is encouraged and appreciated

We have done lot of training and coaching. One of our greatest basic tool is the Impact Clinic.

1000+ senior researchers and post-docs have participated our impact training since 2015.

The clinic helps researchers to understand what ‘impact’ means and why it is important in the world today. Especially the funding entities are sharp about impact. So far we have trained 1000+ post-doc and senior researchers. We give tools and ways to describe the impact. “The Impact Clinic opened my eye to realize that a good funding proposal is not all about science”, says a researcher in his feedback.

Business-Research Collaboration

One of our newest tool is the the Business Collaboration Accelerator for Faculties. The accelerator is designed for faculties to map the faculty’s current business collaboration situation and to make the most of the possible under-utilised potential.

Accelerator for faculties is designed to help faculties and centres in strategic business collaboration planning. This tool was created and piloted in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine during year 2018.

During the year 2018 we gave lot of support for partnering and co-creation. Just to mention few: we supported the Academy of Finland flagship applications, helped to build up the consortiums for Business Finland fundings and networked with many innovation ecosystems.

There was a +27% increase in Business Finland funding to the UH in 2018 (18,6M€ vs. 2017, 14,7M€)

How could you benefit from our services? As you can see, we support research-business collaboration in many ways and we have lot of activities around it. If you feel our team could support you, contact us at businessteam (at) helsinki.fi and let’s have a talk and see more closely what we could do for the benefit or your research impact and business collaboration. We are here to help you!

Moodle video training: Researcher’s Guide to Business Collaboration

|

Would you like to approach companies but don’t know how to do it? Do you think they have data you are interested in? Or would you like to have the company co-funding your research?

There are several ways companies can co-operate with the university. However, you need to get the company interested in your work before you can start negotiating for collaboration.

Take the first step towards university – business partnership and watch a 1 hour and 20 minute video to learn the basics. Dr. Caroline Heckman will guide you from the first contact to the signed contract. Each module contains a short informative section, which is followed by a case example presented by a researcher. The modules (each 6-19 minutes only) can be watched in any order, however you may gain more if you watch all of them.

This link will take you to Moodle. Log in using your university password.

Crowdsourcing and business collaboration helped in collection of research material

|

One of the most time-demanding steps of research project is collecting the research material. Occasionally, however, it is possible to co-operate with a corporate partner which can arrange the collection smoothly. One such example is the alliance professor Olli Vapalahti and Archipelago Doctors (Saaristolääkärit) formed a few years ago.

Archipelago Doctors Ltd is a company operating a minibus circulating in coastal Finland and providing medical services, e.g. vaccinations.  Customers have got increasingly interested in vaccination against TBE, tick borne encephalitis virus, as the virus has become more common. In 2017, 82 people in Finland were infected.

The tick bus (Punkkibussi) parked close to the entrance of a big shopping mall. Citizens walk in to get vaccinations and deliver tick samples both from humans and animals.

 

In summer of 2017 Dr. Olli Vapalahti’s research group launched together with the Archipelago Doctors a crowdsourcing-based project encouraging residents of Espoo and Lauttasaari to collect ticks and bring them to the TBE bus. The ticks, no matter if they originated from nature, human skin or animal fur, were all frozen and delivered to Vapalahti’s laboratory to be further examined.

During the summer season altogether 665 ticks from Espoo and 88 from neighboring Lauttasaari were studied. About 10 % were infected with TBE. At present Vapalahti is preparing a scientific paper together with the Archipelago Doctors. Thanks to university – company partnership, the citizens now know which areas are infected with the pathogen. Whether the people avoid these areas or take the vaccination is their own decision.

One of the tick samples from Siberian cat Amur was found to be TBE positive. Veterinarian Lauri Kareinen took a blood sample from the cat in order to study the virus antibodies.

 

 

Vaikuttavuustyöpajan jalanjälki

|

Glasgown yliopistossa työskentelevä Impact manager Nicol Keith ja hänen kollegansa Rose-Marie Barbeau pitivät 5.10.2017 Helsingin yliopiston päärakennuksessa työpajan tutkijoille ja tutkimushallinnossa työskenteleville.

Impact Workshop

Rose-Marie herätteli kuulijoita pohtimaan, miten vaikuttavuus toteutuu heidän työssään. Vaikuttavuutta eivät ole ainoastaan tutkimustulokset ja niiden tuominen yhteiskunnan käyttöön.

Rose-Marien ilosanoma oli, että tutkimusprojektin kaikissa vaiheissa kannattaa keskustella eri sidosryhmien kanssa. Joskus vaikuttavuus syntyy myös suunnittelematta. Monesti vaikuttavuutta voi myös suunnitella.

Tutkimusprojektin kaikissa vaiheissa kannattaa keskustella eri sidosryhmien kanssa.

Parhaat keskustelut syntyivät, kun Rose-Marie poimi yleisöstä muutaman tutkijan ja kysyi heiltä, miten he arvelivat tutkimuksensa hyödyttävän yhteiskuntaa. Eräs nuori tutkija kertoi perehtyneensä muinaisen kulttuurin monijumalaiseen uskontoon. Hän arveli, että tutkimuksella ei olisi erityistä relevanssia muuten kuin akateemisessa mielessä. Tutkijan avattua hieman asian taustaa, salissa suorastaan kohahti. Kädet nousivat ja läsnäolijat vakuuttivat vuorotellen, että tutkimus linkittyi aivan selvästi nykypäivän elämään. Muinaisen kulttuurin kuninkaat olivat hyödyntäneet uskontoa oman valtansa pönkittämisessä – aivan samoin kuin nykyäänkin näemme tapahtuvan. Tämä yhteys nykyaikaan pitäisi ehdottomasti tuoda esiin rahoitushakemuksissa!

Muinaisen kulttuurin kuninkaat olivat hyödyntäneet uskontoa oman valtansa pönkittämisessä – aivan samoin kuin nykyäänkin näemme tapahtuvan. Tämä yhteys nykyaikaan pitäisi ehdottomasti tuoda esiin rahoitushakemuksissa!

Barbeau painotti tutkijoiden ja tutkimuksen näkymistä sosiaalisessa mediassa. Se on vaikutuskanava, jota ei aina muisteta hyödyntää tarpeeksi. Vaikuttavuuden asiantuntijan mielestä omaa digitaalista jalanjälkeä kannattaa kasvattaa. ORCID-tunniste auttaa linkittämään kaikki omat artikkelit oman tunnuksen alle, vaikka urapolku kulkisi yliopistosta toiseen. Altmetriset palvelu, kuten Altmetrics ja PlumXt puolestaan helpottavat keskusteluiden seuraamisessa. Kuka on kiinnostunut juuri sinun tutkimuksestasi? Jos ei ole, voitko auttaa asiaa kirjoittamalla blogia, tviittaamalla tai Facebookin avulla?

Lentäväksi lauseeksi päivän mittaan muodostui One size doesn’t fit all. Tällä lausahduksella Keith ja Barbeau kiteyttivät vaikuttavuuden moninaisuuden. Jokainen aihe ja jokainen tutkija ovat erilaisia. Omat toimintatavat löytyvät ja kehittyvät kokeilemalla. Kertomalla tutkimuksesta itselleen sopivalla tavalla voi tavoittaa uusia kohderyhmiä, saada ideoita ja kumppaneita, mainetta ja rahoitusta.