Capacity-Building in Technology Transfer

Topic description

Scope:

Specific challenge: Many technology transfer (TT) offices in universities, research institutes and other public research organisations, as well as a significant number of newly established TT funds and institutions and regions aspiring to set up such funds, lack staff with appropriate practical training and enough professional experience to make a success of the TT process in bringing promising R&D results to market. Encouraging and where appropriate incentivising the more established and experienced funds and TT offices (TTOs) to share their expertise and best practices with their less experienced counterparts will help boost Europe's ability to turn scientific knowledge into new, commercialised products and services. In addition, bringing the more established TT funds into contact with each other will help foster more cross-border investments.

Scope: Proposals should take account of a) the TT landscape, players and dynamics in the Member States and the countries associated with Horizon 2020 and b) the supply and demand of TT expertise in addressing:

1)      Development of a capacity-building strategy and consequent implementation plan that makes use of techniques such as (but not necessarily limited to) secondments, coaching, mentoring, workshops, courses, training materials, social media and other forms of exchanging and transferring best practices.

2)      The validation of the implementation plan by stakeholders.

3)      The execution of the implementation plan.

The approach taken should complement and ideally build on or integrate with existing capacity-building schemes at EU, regional and national levels, working with them where possible. The proposal should also address how best to monitor and possibly adapt the scheme in the light of experience.

Proposers must have and must demonstrate deep knowledge of the TT domain with proven experience in the field, and also significant experience of capacity-building. This action will be linked via DG Research & Innovation with the implementation of the TT Funding Facility pilot.

All intellectual property rights (IPR) pertinent to the materials, trainings, websites and other action developed by the project will be owned by the European Commission and will be shared with other EU-funded TT and IPR support measures.

The project should operate for a maximum period of 36 months.

Expected impact:

         Sustainable, comprehensive strategy for building capacity in TT across Europe.

         Higher levels of TT expertise in Europe.

         Greater commercialisation of scientific knowledge in Europe.

         Increase in cross-border TT-related investments in Europe.

Type of action: Coordination & Support Action (CSA).