Anders Permin

Anders Permin is a trained veterinarian with a PhD in veterinary microbiology. He has specialised in translational research and is currently employed at the Department for Innovation and Sector Development working with commercialisation of research from the life-science area.

- The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is involved in ESS in several projects such as Interreg and BrightnESS. In Work Package 3, the focus is on innovation and technology transfer. I work with development of innovation culture and I have created a number of courses about this topic at DTU. My work in BrightnESS is occupied with transferring these ideas and thoughts to ESS.

We have recently held a course day at ESS, where we discussed what innovation is and how you go from an idea to a finished product that can be commercialised. ESS will be a service organisation, where companies, universities and organisations can perform experiments and therefore it is very relevant to talk about technology transfer and intellectual property rights. ESS has opened a technology transfer office, where they will talk to a lot of people at ESS to see which ideas can be picked up and continuously developed, to foster internal innovation.

I am very pleased to be part of creating this innovation culture at ESS. I have previously worked with this process at other organisations, and it is always interesting to see how the process works out. Focusing on innovation is quite new in some research and university environments. Both areas are concerned with creating new ideas, but innovation has the commercial angle.

The biggest challenge in WP3, as I see it, is the timeframe. ESS is a very large and comprehensive project in many aspects and while the ESS management supports creating an innovation culture, there are many other deadlines that must be met as well as achieving an innovation culture and creating a technology transfer setup.