Effective Technology Transfer in Biotechnology

Closed

ETTBio addresses the challenging issue of still unused economic potential of research institutes and universities as source for innovation and therefore efficient regional economic development. ETTBio has a sectoral focus on biotechnology for the following reasons: 1) Biotechnology is considered a key sector (and key enabling technology) in Europe for the 21st century, 2) it has very specific characteristics, which have a significant impact on the successful design of the technology transfer process and 3) because of existing deficiencies of policies and lack of experiences. ETTBio aims to identify, exchange and communicate good practices about effectiveness of technology transfer in biotechnology in order to improve local and regional policies. The expected outcome of improved policies will be a higher number of new companies, creation of new jobs, higher tax income as well as an increase of the regional innovative capacity and economic performance. To have a heterogeneous level of experience, 10 partners from 7 regions were selected. Involved partners from UK and BE have extensive experience in the topic, DE and ES partners have intermediate experience and policy partners in PL, EE and CZ are just beginning to design policies for technology transfer in biotechnology. The project partnership includes regional and local authorities, research institutes and universities. This is considered the best possible combination for gathering all relevant information and transforming it to concrete policy actions. In EE & CZ, only regional authorities are involved because the regions recently started to focus on biotechnology. In UK and BE, the policy partners are involved during the entire project, but are not directly integrated as a partner because only little improvements of policies are expected. The partners provide a broad geographical coverage. This captures significant differences in the success of existing regional policy. Main activities are: 1) "Launch conference" to create a catalogue on benchmarking criteria for techn. transfer in biotechnology as output, 2) regional analysis phase to identify good practices (GP) with site visits in UK & BE, with 7 regional analysis reports as output, 3) selection of 3 GP per region & analysis as case studies (CS: in-depth elaboration of GP & suggestions how to further improve it). 4) CS exchange phase, where each region chooses 3 relevant CS accord. to identified regional challenges and adapts them to regional context with the aim of transferring the respective GP. 5) Based on the results, policy recommendations & implementation plans (IP) will be developed for each region 6) Overview of project results incl. IP will be presented to national & European policy makers as well as interested stakeholders in biotechnology at the "Closing conference" in BE. We will further provide general project communication media (incl. leaflets, a website, online newsletter).

Medium