AIMday gives concrete form to collaboration in partnership agreements

This time, AIMday was used in a slightly different way – namely to co-create an activity plan for the partnership from a bottom-up perspective. AIMday is about finding opportunities for collaboration between academia and organisations by matching the challenges facing external organisations with suitable researchers at the University.

The strategic partnership between the biotech company Cytiva and Uppsala University was signed six months ago. Cytiva is Uppsala’s biggest private employer, with a long-standing strong link to both research and teaching at the University.

An agenda for the future

By using AIMday as a tool to set the agenda for the collaboration between Cytiva and the University, the hope is to obtain a broader basis for the activity plan, with more employees from both Cytiva and the University getting involved in the process. Helena Danielson, Professor of Biochemistry at the Department of Chemistry – BMC and partnership manager for the University’s strategic partnership with Cytiva, believes that more perspectives will emerge as a result of the AIMday event.

“For Uppsala University, collaboration with industry is important for both education and research, but we have not taken advantage of the great potential that exists in collaborating with Cytiva. The fact that we have now established a formal partnership gives us new contacts and pathways for working more intently towards increasing our cooperation,” says Helena Danielson.

Jesper Hedberg is Cytiva’s partnership manager:

“Research and development in Cytiva’s core business is progressing rapidly and in the long term we need to be able to utilise all new technologies that don’t currently fit within our core business – and this is where the University can help to find them outside our scope. Our goal is to deliver better products faster so that we can contribute to better health globally,” he says.

Building collaboration

Joint research and education are already taking place, and a review is now underway to examine how we want to work together in the future, what is already in place and what each side would like to add.

“The idea behind using AIMday as a tool is to identify new activities where we can collaborate and to broaden the group of individuals involved in collaborations. At the same time, we can draw our colleagues’ attention to opportunities for collaboration, even if they are not involved in a specific AIMday event,” notes Helena Danielson.

“We hoped that this AIMday would boost the partnership – and we have already achieved that. The event has raised the partnership’s profile at both Cytiva and the University, and thus increased the chances of achieving our respective operational goals. We have two completely different organisations that need to find good ways to cooperate,” says Jesper Hedberg.

Differences in culture and drivers

Helena Bysell is the partnership manager for the partnership with Cytiva in the context of her role as Collaboration Manager at the Division for Research and Partnership Support at the University. She explains that one of the major challenges repeatedly raised in collaborations between the University and organisations outside academia is the differences in the organisations’ culture and drivers.

“In order to achieve a successful collaboration, it’s important to be responsive and to be very good at identifying the different needs that exist in each of the organisations, and to be able to package these into concrete activities. This is something that is particularly important when working to strengthen collaboration between two large and complex organisations,” adds Helena Bysell.

Less waffle and more concrete activity

At the end of the day, everyone agreed that it had been a very successful day mainly because of the open and positive atmosphere, but also because the discussions proved to be both concrete and interesting.

“These events can easily get too woolly, but we’ve already arranged several follow-up meetings and many concrete focus areas. Now we need to together choose the pathways and focus moving forward so we can find the right direction for the partnership,” concludes Jesper Hedberg.

Kristin Blom