Academia’s role in innovation

At Fintechlab, we believe in the power of open innovation and this is why we launched a new meetup series called “Open Innovation: Theory Meets Expertise.” The second session explored the topic “Academia’s role in innovation.” Experts from three prestigious universities joined us for a frank and open discussion about how they manage innovation within their institutions and in collaboration with students and researchers. In this post, you can read our key takeaways and learn from the best to build your knowledge in this topic.

The panel was facilitated by Mary Alcantara Deputy-Managing Director of MKB Fintechlab. Speakers included Dr. Péter Fehér Vice-dean of Corvinus Business School, Dr. Andrea Kozma Director of CEU InnovationsLab and Balázs Czibók Innovation Manager at University of Pécs

What is Corvinus, PTE and CEU proud for in innovation?

• Péter is proud of their living lab in Székesfehérvár, the fintech center within the university (Corvinus Fintech Center) and the collaboration with companies such as SAP.
• For Andrea it was definitely winning the Incubation program of the year title in 2017 against well-funded corporate and private programs, the quality of student-initiated projects and the growing organisation in CEU.
• Balázs highlighted the commercialization of research achievements, managing the third biggest IP portfolio in pharmacology within the country.

How to approach innovation as a university?

All participants agreed that the shared value of open innovation lies in openness to everyone with an idea and visible open door policy when anybody with a question can ask the project team.

Engaging stakeholders is a great challenge they are all facing but all three institutions chose a slightly different method to cope with it.

• Corvinus emphasises the importance of collaboration with corporates (like Dorsum, w.up and Netmedia). These collaborations and research projects are well-fundable with the help of government and research grants.
• CEU focused on engaging their faculties, alumni and active students. By being a catalyst inside the university, they can make real-life, innovative capstone projects happen and turn into companies with the help of the internal champions and external corporate partners.
• The University of Pécs took on the responsibility to translate between researchers and industry which considering the different working methods is no easy task. This translator role allowed the University to enhance the effectiveness of research projects and maximize the number of projects with valuable IP.

What can universities offer to the innovation ecosystem?

The biggest assets these institutions can offer in an innovation ecosystem are the independence to work with various partners to validate product ideas and research a specific fields, mentorship, a safe environment to try out new endeavours and fail within a support system and deep knowledge of the ecosystem with decades of research data.

The challenges in academic innovation

It represents a great challenge to manage the different project management styles and mindsets between researchers and product developers. Since academic research usually is motivated by the researchers interest in a subject and not the market need, the expected outcome is defined during the process not at the beginning.

As a general advice, different locations need different approaches — for instance in Székesfehérvár Corvinus University needs to be much more active part of the local community than it is required in Budapest.

What’s next for academic innovation?

All in all, the event was a great testament that innovation is well and alive in Hungarian universities. There is no magic recipe for approaching the subject but as you can see, universities can learn from each other and it is worth sharing experiences.

If you are interested more, our speakers suggested the following resources to follow:

• MIT audio materials
• European network of living labs
• MOOC courses Pécs and CEU

Join us for our next session April 25 on “Innovation in Government”!