Collaboration between business and research is important to achieving more innovation and leads to more commercialisations. Inven2 has made targeted efforts on industry collaboration for close to two years through a number of different projects.

Photo: Jannicke Kristoffersen, Inven2 

As many as 76% of researchers at the five biggest academic institutions in Norway who commercialise their research cooperate with business and industry partners, according to a report from MENON (2018) on incentives for commercialisation of research.

“This very much coincides with Inven2’s own observations and confirms our focus on industry collaboration,” says Lise Rødsten, who is responsible for industry collaboration at Inven2.

“Inven2 has a strong position in a broad network comprising both businesses and research communities. This means that our employees can build bridges between researchers and industry and lower the threshold for researchers initiating collaborations,” says Rødsten.

Industry collaboration in Inven2 is wide-ranging and involves the whole organisation in various projects and activities, such as agreement competence, 1:1 meetings and partnering at international conferences.

“Inven2 is now well positioned to help researchers to get the industry collaborations they want,” says Rødsten.

Broad cooperation with the ecosystem

Inven2 is one of a number of players in Norway that works with industry collaboration. Projects and activities are therefore coordinated with the clusters Oslo Cancer Cluster, Norway HealthTech, the Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry in Norway (LMI) and various incubators.

More than two thirds of Inven2’s projects are in the fields of life science and medical technology, which is due to the strong life science communities at both the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital. The international biopharmaceutical industry in particular is playing a leading role in open innovation.

“This is the reason why much of our industry collaboration work is in the field of life science. An example is SPARK Norway, UiO:Life Science’s innovation programme. Here, Inven2 contributes expertise, project managers, projects from our portfolio and networks,” says Rødsten.

Safeguarding researchers’ interests

Over a number of years, Inven2 has developed important expertise on contracts entered into between academia and industry.

“Inven2’s strength in this respect is contract expertise, but also that we minimise bureaucracy in our organisation at the same time as being predictable. We can help to draw up agreements between researchers or research groups and industry where the researchers’ interests are safeguarded,” says Rødsten.

An example of this is the cooperation agreements that have been negotiated and prepared for ImTECH over the past year. ImTECH is a new centre for diagnostic imaging at Oslo University Hospital that was officially opened in March 2018.

The centre’s main partner is GE Healthcare, but it also cooperates with big and small national and international partners from both the commercial and academic spheres.

“We’ve received invaluable help and guidance from Inven2, both when it comes to sealing the agreements with our partners and when putting in place a framework for the agreements that we will use going forward,” says Anne Catrine Trægde Martinsen, who both initiated and manages the centre.

Read more about ImTECH here.

International ambassador

Inven2 also functions as an ambassador for good Norwegian research and is a shop window for both national and international partners.

“The research and development environment in immunotherapy for cancer at the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital is very advanced. Inven2 has therefore taken the initiative to collect information about a number of communities in this field to show the breadth of our expertise here in Norway,” says Rødsten.

Several of the staff at Inven2 also attend international partnering conferences throughout the year at which they pitch the projects in the company’s portfolio to representatives from different global companies.

One of these conferences is Nordic Life Science Days, held in Scandinavia each year, where Inven2 also participates at a joint Norwegian stand.

Meeting places and matchmaking

Inven2 cooperates on organising seminars and 1:1 meetings between researchers and the industry in Norway, such as the Matchmaking event held at the Cutting Edge festival.

“We find it important that this is a low-threshold service for researchers where they can meet industry contacts in central Oslo via arenas we have organised together with other parties,” says Rødsten.

Read more about the matchmaking here.

“It is important that we contribute in the areas where we can be most useful, and direct contact between researchers and industry is an area where we can make a particular difference,” says Rødsten.

Here are some of the arenas for meetings between academia and industry that Inven2 has contributed to in 2018:

February:
Partnering at ‘Partnership for Life’

Inven2 organised a partnering session during the Partnership for Life conference in February and facilitated more than 40 meetings between representatives of industry, academic and start-ups in the health industry.

This is the fourth time ‘Partnership for Life’ has been organised by the Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry in Norway (LMI), and attendees included AbbVie, Bayer, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and the Life Science Cluster.

“The global pharmaceutical companies bring international leaders to this conference. This provides a unique opportunity for the Norwegian community to network with decision-makers in these companies,” says Rødsten.

Read more about the meeting here.

April:
Meeting between GlaxoSmithKline, UiO and OUS on collaboration in the field of pharmaceutical development

On 11 April, Inven2 and SPARK Norway organised a seminar bringing together European representatives from the global biopharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and researchers and management from both the University of Oslo (UiO) and Oslo University Hospital (OUS). Over 60 enthusiastic participants attended the seminar about GSK’s programme for collaboration with academia on the development of pharmaceuticals.

“We met GSK at the partnering conference BioFIT in December 2017. They were interested in learning more about our projects, and this was why they came to Oslo in April,” says Rødsten.

Read more about the meeting here.

September:
Matchmaking at Cutting Edge

For the second year running, Inven2 held a special ‘Matchmaking’ session at the Cutting Edge festival. Almost 90 1:1 meetings between researchers, mature companies and start-ups were held. “We received important feedback,” says researcher Henriette Andresen after her meeting with Pfizer.

Read more about the matchmaking here.

November:
Meeting between Evotec and researchers at the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital

Read the article on the university’s website.

December:
Partnering days with Roche

Roche is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. In December, executives from Roche’s European office participated in a two-day conference in Oslo to find new partners from Norway. Oslo Cancer Cluster and Norway Health Tech organised the conference together with Roche, and Inven2 contributed by bringing in innovation projects.

Participants included start-ups, biotechnology companies, researchers, clinicians, politicians and students.

Read the article on Oslo Cancer Cluster’s website.