At ALBA, AIDAinnova’s scientific coordinator gave his thoughts on how industry and academia can better work together. 

On 1 December, AIDAinnova was present at round table discussion of a workshop on industry opportunities in lightsource infrastructures. The workshop was organized at the initiative of LEAPS-INNOV, another EU-funded project, and took place at the ALBA Synchrotron, close to Barcelona. 

The event saw a very large industrial participation, with over 70 companies coming from Spain and other parts of the world, with a large percentage of SMEs. 

One of the highlights of the event was the panel discussion on how industry and academia can interact better together by harmonizing innovation and production of new technologies, and making use of the available public instruments offered by national and European policy makers. 

Invited to speak, AIDAinnova’s scientific coordinator, Paolo Giacomelli, stressed how it is particularly important for academia to go out of its comfort zone and contact industries with which they have never worked together before. “Lack of communication is often the main bottleneck in the academia-industry relations: academia doesn't know what many companies can offer, while industries don't know what academia needs. Bridging this gap is essential to ensure the best possible cooperation”. 

Legislation is another way of deepening this relationship: “It would be very positive if there were more common legislation platforms across the various EU countries, in order to facilitate the bureaucratic and legal issues needed to kick-start co-development between academia and industry, and in particular to facilitate especially the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues”. 

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