After its first year’s successful edition, EELISA InnoCORE held its II R&I symposium on 12th of July, 2023, hosted by ITÜ in Istanbul. The symposium was be dedicated to look into three fundamental topics for the Alliance at the moment: Enabling EELISA Research &Innovation Strategy through EELISA Communities, on the one side (workshop); and Reinforcing cooperation in R&I with other sectors, especially academia-business cooperation, on the other side. Regarding this last point, the debates on business-academia cooperation will focus on two specific topics: Industrial PhDs (panel I of the afternoon session) and Industrial Chairs (panel II of the afternoon session).
With over 40 EELISA Communities active by June 2023, communities represent a critical and unique concept of our Alliance. These mission-driven working groups that bring together students, teachers, and researchers from all partner universities with prestigious professionals, grassroots organizations, citizens, private companies, and public institutions to find innovative solutions to real-world challenges. To add to their educational side and help them promote its R&I dimension, EELISA partners recently performed an analyses of the potential of challenges revealed in first EELISA Communities with an identification of scientific and technological needs. The II symposium will dedicate its first morning session to debate with representatives of communities and other R&I experts about future directions for supporting the R&I dimension of communities.
Regarding academia-business cooperation, under its R&I branch, InnoCORE, EELISA partners set themselves the ambitious goal of working towards (1) constructing a dynamic university innovation ecosystem among the consortium members and (2) meeting the transformative challenge of reshaping university operations to provide services for industrial, economical and societal development. To achieve these goals, EELISA partners have done a first mapping and peer-learning exercise regarding the two topics highlighted above: industrial PhDs and Industrial Chairs. Following this first mapping exercise, R&I experts from the different EELISA partners gathered in Istanbul in order to delve deeper into both topics and explore how to push collaboration at EELISA level. Participants from the panels included highest-ranked experts in both topics from their institutions as well as national agencies.