IRC-announcement evaluated
IRC, Industrial Research Centers, is one of SSF’s biggest calls. In this effort, SSF wanted to ensure need management by letting representatives from the industry formulate and choose its most strategic long-term research needs in collaboration with leading academic institutions.
The research Projects are built for disruptive breakthroughs. Not for incremental improvement of existing products or services. The purpose is to stimulate a strategic collaboration between academia and industry. Each company was only allowed to submit one application. This was true for smaller companies as well as large groups. Each university institution had the same restriction. In this way, companies and institutions had to prioritize hard. We were curious how this call was perceived and decided to evaluate the announcement, including process and preparation. The assignment went to Damvad Analytics and the consultant Jonas Öhlin. One conclusion is that the call encouraged broad cooperation, innovation and priorities. The evaluation process is described as very well managed. The two main objections are that consortia formation took a lot of time, and the big companies did not like that they were limited to one application.
Read the report here: Centres of Attention