Siegfried Reich

Polytehnica Timisoara

A visit to the No. 1 technical university of Romania: UPT, the “Politehnica”, i.e., technical university of Timisoara (in Western Romania). Some 14000 students (with some 30%+ female students!!!), excellent staff and apparently 35% external funding (I have been told by Rector Prof. Robu). Very impressive figures, indeed.

Add comment October 28th, 2007

PhD and Polythechnic Universities …

… are an “evergreen” type of discussion. Universities do not want to give away the right of awarding PhDs. On the other hand, there is a significant number of excellent master students at the level of the “polytechnic universities” (Fachhochschulen) that would well qualify for a PhD programme.

In Sweden, they created a work around with the so-called “Licenciate” (according to wikipedia, there are several other countries with such a mechanism). The licentiate is somewhat between master and PhD, so to say on the way towards the PhD.

In a XING user-group I came across a group that provides links to related sites, e.g. promotion-fh.de or thesis.de.

Add comment September 18th, 2007

opening of ditact summer school 2007 …

… with Sabine Fleischmann, managing director of Sun Microsystems Austria, as keynote speaker. She mentioned Sun’s slogan of “The age of participation”, see e.g. Scott McNealy’s message or Jonathan Schwartz’s blog entry.

This is Ditact No. 5 – a success model.

Add comment August 20th, 2007

Digital Natives

Prof. Radu Vasiu from the Universitatea “Politehnica” din Timisoara pointed me to a paper by Marc Prensky about digital natives, i.e., the generation born from 1975 onwards who grew up with digital technology around them.

Prof. Vasiu mentioned a study they did with students, he (himself) was astonished by the SMS-style of communicating (LOL = later online), H4T5TNT (home for tea at 5 tonight), see another article by Mark Prensky. “GTGPOS (got to go, parent over shoulder) is another important code.

Add comment July 23rd, 2007

ALNURI – Summer School 2007

ALNURI = Academic Learning for non-university researchers, an initiative between FH Salzburg/Salzburg Research and University of Timisoara to promote so-called industrial PhDs. It is supported by Forschung Austria. These days, the 1st summer school is taking place in Salzburg.

Add comment July 11th, 2007

FYI, The Economist: Rise and Fall of Corporate R&D

the March issue of The Economist has an article “Out of the dusty labs” on the rise and fall of corporate R&D. Quite interesting to see how V. Bush’s initial idea (of separating research and development) blurs in today’s economy.

The “fusion of research and development” helps in addressing a fundamental issue in Bush’s separation: how do (good) ideas get into marketable products?

At IBM “technology transfer” is even considered a bad phrase: there should not be a need for a handoff anyway.

The success of Dell and also Apple’s iPod are good examples that basic research is not a necessity for having success in the IT sector: (new) business models get more important, again, the classic way (basic research, development, marketing, etc.) is not true any more.

And finally: Mr. Brown (formerly running PARC) is cited the following way: “When I started out running PARC, I thought 99% of the work was creating the innovation, and then throwing it over the transom for dumb marketers to figure out how to market it. ” And now I realise that there is at least as much creativity on finding ways to take the idea to market as coming up with the idea in the first place. I would have spent my time differently if I had figured out that early on.”

Add comment June 3rd, 2007

Opening of GIScience at Salzburg

Salzburg has (again) an institute of the academy of sciences: the GIScience research lab has been officially opened on May 30, 2007. Congratulations to Josef Strobl!

It is good to see that not only applied research is funded but that also basic research can florish. Geoinformatics in Salzburg is getting (much) stronger!

Add comment May 30th, 2007

EARTO Annual Conference, May 3-4 Munich

EARTO Annual Conference in Munich. EARTO is the European Association for RTO (Research Technology Organisations).

• Setting the scene by Erkki KM Leppävuori (President of EARTO and
  President of VTT, Finland). He puts emphasis on the relationship of innovation and business processes.
• Lars-Göran Rosengren, CEO Volvo Technologies Corporation, reflected on the industrial innovation system and the relationship to RTOs. Where in the process would (external) RTOs fit in? He recommends to RTOs to
  1. Clarify mission: provide problem solutions (in an application context)
  2. Improve strategies and operational excellence: create realistic strategies
  3. Build a European structure and increase critical mass: “Europeanise”
  4. Start to globalise, e.g. by setting up collaborative networks in a systematic way

  Governments should strengthen their governance of RTOs. Finally, industry should improve their efforts for external R&D.

• Johann Wilhelm Arntz, President of AiF, Germany, talked about innovation and SMEs. He basically presented structure, activities and funding of AiF, an agency mainly targeted at SMEs (300 Mio. EUR funding per year, 103 members, targeting almost 50.000 companies, mostly SMEs).
• Risk Sharing Finance Facility (RSFF) by Anna Krzyzanowska (Policy Officer, DG Research). She talked about loans as another tool to support R&D and innovation (“avoid Skype going to the US to grow”). The initiative is in close cooperation with the European Investment Bank (EIB); RSFF is open to companies and RTOs/universities; 1 Bio. EUR is to be invested.
• Ernst Kristiansen (Executive Vice President, of SINTEF) talked about RTO Participation in the 6th Framework Programme. The analysis starts with the hypothesis that RTO participation in FP6 is strong and that countries with strong RTO involvement benefit in their economy. 51.000 contracts have been analysed. Both RTOs and universities are often coordinators, at least: their share in coordination is higher than their share in budget. RTOs are heavily involved in the thematic priorities; they have a strong involvement in IPs; in summary, RTOs are key players in FP6.
• Wolfgang Polt, Joanneum Research (Vienna Office) talked about Benchmarking:
  RTO Corporate Development Strategy. The future of PROs (Public research organisations) has been analysed in a study (covering the years 2000 – 2005), starting with strategy papers of existing EARTO members and questionnaires, etc. Some basic indicators: 100k income per employee, most have had major organisational changes in recent years, have a had (strong) growth (this implies that cuts in governmental funding have been compensated by more contractual research), … PROs often serve the role of (national) hubs for several activities, e.g. competence centres in Austria, etc. Orientation points are mostly international, often regional (but less often national). Smaller ones do hardly do basic research; only moderate scientific and commercial risks are taken. Outlook/future: RTOs expect competition to increase, mainly from academia (secondly from private RTOs). At the same time the cooperation with academia is being looked after.
• Cooperation between University and RTOs by Reinhard Maschuw (Chairman of the Executive Board, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany). He argues that international excellence would be a key indicator for benchmarking science and innovation; we are “good” on average, but we lack the top-centres, e.g. top universities, etc. He basically argues for closer cooperation between universities and RTOs. The Karlsruhe way of achieving this is “KIT – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology“.

Afternoon session

• Jan Vogel (TNO, the Netherlands) “Collaboration with industry – impact for
  an RTO”. He outlines a three-box model: one for society, one for the market, one for science & technology.
• Sonja Sheikh (Austrian Institute for SME Research) “How RTOs can support SMEs”. Some data: 99,6% of Austria’s 270.000 companies are SMEs, of which 87% have less than 10 employees.
• Helene Ulmer from CEA talked about “RTO from Research to Innovation”. She mentioned a model with four “P”s: Publications, Patents, Prototypes and Products. The DRT that Helene mainly reported on, focuses on patents in order to bridge the gap between publications and products. Her conclusions are: RTOs should help the transition from basic research to technological research.
• Ram Mohan (inBAC, USA) “Technology commercialization in the new global paradigm”. Some facts: Only 15-20% of R&D derive value; innovation must be done where it is done the best, it must be commercialised where it can be done so most effectively; startups fail to 70% due to lack of money. Key problem is the disconnection between R&D and market: the incubation gap. Thinking big/global is amongst the excellent messages he packaged in his talk. Even when starting an SME you need to think global. Finally: Silicon Valley is the place on earth to start a company.
• Frank M. Salzgeber (ESA, the Netherlands), “The space you need to get your business off the ground”. He started by quoting Nasa: “A society that stops exploring is a society that stops progressing”. Then mainly argues for thinking innovative and cross-sector (undermind with several examples from Apple, etc.).

For a background paper on the role of RTOs in ERA see also ec.europa.eu.

Add comment May 3rd, 2007

Forschung Austria Workshop on Indicators and Monitoring

Forschung Austria organised a workshop on assessment and monitoring of RTD programmes in Salzburg, with a focus on “smaller scale programmes”. Participants were from Joanneum Research, Salzburg Research and partly ARC.

Presenters included

• Dr. Alexander Haas from Helmholtz Gesellschaft in Germany
• Dr. Hans-Peter Lüttenberg from Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, in Germany
• Mag. Markus Gruber from Convelop, an RTD consulting company in Austria

What I personally learned at the workshop: Germany invests substantial amounts of resources into non-University R&D, even when size-wise compared to Austria; it is a clever idea to think of exploitation even after the end of a project (DLR does so, for instance, two years later. Great idea!); indicators are truly difficult: even if they have agreed semantics and similar values, the structures behind may still not be comparable.

Add comment April 27th, 2007

ACM Hypertext 2007

This year’s hypertext conference will be held in Manchester (U.K.), 10th – 12th September 2007. See www.ht07.org.

Add comment January 15th, 2007