The Innovation Centre is a hub for business cooperation
Kirjoittanut Jouko Uusitalo
The University of Oulu Innovation Centre helps the business community use research results and expertise in the development of its business operations and supports cooperation between researchers and companies. What all do our responsibilities include?
The Innovation Centre was established in 2019. Before that the activities went under the name Innovation Services and were run by a team of 2–3 people. This team has now grown into an experienced and diverse group of 12–13 people.
The Innovation Centre’s roster includes IP experts, business experts, lawyers and account managers. Five of them hold a doctoral degree, six of them have long experience in the private sector, and three of them have founded several companies. They have jointly accumulated nearly 300 years of work experience from the Innovation Centre’s competence areas.
Tasks of the Innovation Centre
The Innovation Centre has three tasks that fall under the responsibility of the Vice Rector for Cooperation: innovation activities, the commercialisation of expertise, and cooperation and partnerships.
The commercialisation of research results, referring to the University’s innovation activities, means developing researchers’ inventions into research-based start-ups or into technology transfer to research contract partners and other industry in the form of IP licensing or sales. Around 2–3 research-based start-ups emerge at the University of Oulu every year. Compared to other Finnish universities, we are second only to Aalto University, which generates 5–10 start-ups a year, while other universities produce 1–3. We currently have more than ten commercialisation projects in the company creation pipeline. We conclude around twenty technology transfer agreements every year, and the number of licensing and sales agreements along with the income received from them have multiplied since the Innovation Centre’s establishment.
The commercialisation of expertise includes selling researchers’ expertise to companies as contract research, laboratory and equipment services and commissioned training and education in close collaboration with researchers and faculties. We help companies of all sizes find suitable researchers in our faculties to solve companies’ research-based product development problems, utilise our laboratory and equipment base, and provide training to overcome skills shortage. The most intensive long-term research cooperation provides companies with inventions, patents and technologies, as well as new business based on them – that is, innovation. While the University’s business is growing and is now measured in millions of euros, it still accounts for only 2–3 per cent of the total budget. In other words, there is still room to expand it without compromising our profile as a research university.
The commercialisation of expertise also covers Business Finland projects carried out in cooperation with companies, in which the Innovation Centre’s role is to help researchers find suitable business partners, assist them in presenting their research topics to companies and support them in preparing applications that meet Business Finland’s requirements, taking into account future business opportunities in the exploitation of project results. Business Finland is the University of Oulu’s third most important provider of external funding after the Academy of Finland and EU funding instruments. The University of Oulu is among the three largest university recipients of Business Finland funding, and it has received approximately EUR 13 million in funding in recent years. Indeed, more than 20 projects are launched annually. This year, a record 30 cooperation projects have already been initiated.
The Innovation Centre’s third field, cooperation and partnerships, includes tasks such as the coordination of business and stakeholder cooperation and students’ entrepreneurial activities at the university level, key account manager activities in faculties, business meetings and presentations of the University’s operations and services to companies, the organisation of cooperation events, and numerous contract preparations. The University’s eight faculties have a total of 12 part-time key account managers, who under the Innovation Centre’s lead, manage relationships with approximately 50 business and stakeholder customers important to the University. This customer base includes all the large companies assigned as ‘Leading companies’ by Business Finland. Each of them has its own contact person at the University, who presents the companies’ needs to researchers and the researchers’ research topics to the companies. Leading companies are building their future business ecosystems to meet global challenges. Business Finland’s Leading company and other projects are continuously looking for SMEs to join the value chain exploiting the results.
In addition to these tasks, the Innovation Centre is responsible for preparing non-disclosure, framework, partnership and contract research agreements with companies, as well as Business Finland consortium agreements in cooperation with Legal Services. We have two legal counsels focusing exclusively on the Innovation Centre’s agreement needs to ensure that contract negotiations are not unduly delayed. Including IP exploitation agreements and material and data transfer agreements, the Innovation Centre prepares nearly 300 cooperation agreements every year.
Learn more at UBF
The University Business Forum is our annual main event for business cooperation. This year, it was organised on 12 October. Representatives from eight BF Leading companies were present to speak about their future needs for research and development collaboration. For SMEs, the event was a good opportunity to meet representatives of large companies and discuss possible cooperation in their ecosystems.
This blog post is an expanded version of an opinion piece published in the Kaleva newspaper on 7 October 2023 (in Finnish).
Jouko Uusitalo, PhD
Liiketoiminnan kehittämispäällikkö // Business Development Manager
+358 50 476 9717
jouko.uusitalo@oulu.fi
Innovaatiokeskuksen esimies, asiakaspäällikkötoiminnan ohjaus, innovaatiotoiminta, tutkimustulosten kaupallistaminen, yritysyhteistyö, Proof-of-Concept-rahoitus.
Head of the Innovation Centre, supervision of key account managers, innovations, commercialization of research results, company collaboration, Proof-of-Concept funding.