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ENHANCING PUBLIC RESEARCH
Reggio Emilia Innovazione and the Agenzia per la disffusione delle Tecnologie per l'Innovazione have concluded an agreement which provides the participation of a staff to a course Management Education Project: Valorisation of Public Research, dedicated to increase the management skills of the KTOs officers working in Italian Universities, PROs, Regional Agencies and Science Parks.
The Agenzia per la diffusione delle tecnologie per l’innovazione has been recently established by the Italian Government with the objectives to promote and disseminate innovation, to enhance cooperation between public research system and business world, and to support economic and entrepreneurial valorisation of public research. A stronger relationship between the research and corporate environments can contribute, on one hand, to strengthen the technical and scientific capacities of the industrial system, and on the other hand, in pushing the public system towards a deeper attention for cutting edge research on subjects of potential interest for the country and for enterprises.
One of the Agency’s approaches is oriented to support the development of transfer capacity of knowledge transfer offices (KTOs) of Universities, Public Research Organisations (PROs) and Regional Agencies, with the aim to increase the efficiency of their activities; this is to convert knowledge into socio-economic benefits and effectively exploit publicly-funded research results. One of the major and urgent issues that these organisations must take in due consideration is the strengthening of professional and managerial skills of human resources, who are called to new challenges requiring a specific cultural approach, that is often new to traditional functions undertaken by research organisations.
The objectives described above are specifically mentioned by the Commission Recommendation on the management of intellectual property in knowledge transfer activities and Code of Practice for universities and other public research organisations (C(2008)1329 of 10.04.2008). Moreover, the European Project CERT-TTT (Certified Transnational Technology Transfer Manager, December 2008) has highlighted the importance of training in technology transfer organisations located in European countries, underlining “a lack of TT skilled people”, and therefore recommending ”to promote policies for qualification of TT professionals…throughout individual countries and throughout Europe”.