From open science to open innovation

The ATTRACT Initiative Getting Europe back to work – with science

Some of Europe’s scientific leaders – including the European Southern Observatory, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and CERN – are joining forces to create new products, companies and jobs. The idea: Take the path-breaking detector and imaging technologies they have developed for their scientific work and, with private and public sector partners, convert them to new commercial use. The outcome: A bigger return on Europe’s scientific investment.

The challenge

Fundamental to Europe’s economic recovery are more innovative services to sell, top-class products to export, and well-paying jobs that compete in the global marketplace. But that takes hot technologies – invented and developed in Europe.

For that, there’s a special sector of the European economy that we can tap more effectively: The big Research Infrastructure projects – telescopes, particle accelerators and other capital intensive labs, funded by the public sector.

ATTRACT is an initiative among several of these labs to put their key technologies to extra use – in the economy, for jobs and growth.

The potential

Public investment in science pays dividends: A $13 billion investment in the Human Genome Project in the 1990s has led to an industry worth nearly $1 trillion world-wide, according to a Battelle study. The World Wide Web, pioneered at CERN in the late 1980s, now employs millions. The ATTRACT partner labs have an especially good track record: Technologies they helped develop led to the touch screens in our smartphones, hospital scanners, and five of the top 20 drugs in the world (through use of synchrotrons to analyse drug targets.) ATTRACT is an initiative to harness that innovative power for the European economy, rather than science alone.

The technology and the markets

Detecting the Higgs Boson, or imaging telescope data, is cutting-edge stuff. It requires top-class expertise in magnets, detectors, cameras, computers, networks and software. Much of it is purpose-built; it simply doesn’t exist on the market today. And that’s a unique technical resource – for entrepreneurs, investors, companies and others who can adapt it to new, commercial uses. For instance:

• Medical imaging and radiation detectors. The CT, MRI, PET and other scanners in our hospitals – a $24 billion market - depend on magnet, detector and imaging technologies. ATTRACT can advance this technology.

• Satellite imaging. A $2.1 billion market due to triple over the next decade – and ripe for innovative SMEs to pioneer new consumer Apps and industrial services. ATTRACT imaging algorithms can help.

• Open data. Sharing data on a massive scale – on electricity, traffic, land, resources and more – can unlock more than $3.2 trillion in value. ATTRACT labs pioneer new networking in technologies and data analytics for this.

• Advanced manufacturing. Robotic arms, remote sensors, opto-mechanical assembles – all areas in which ATTRACT labs work, and European industry needs.

What is ATTRACT?

ATTRACT is a new, pan-EU initiative to accelerate the development of these specialist detector and imaging technologies for market – through a process of co-innovation with other labs, SMEs, industry and universities. The aim: to work with scientists, students, entrepreneurs and investors to invent new services and products, and attract new investment to the sector. A pilot effort is already underway at CERN’s Geneva campus, with the aid of Aalto, the leading Finnish university with a world-class reputation for design innovation and management. And at international business school ESADE in Barcelona, Professor Henry Chesbrough – the man who first coined the term ‘open innovation’- is developing a new framework for scaling up this kind of collaboration at scientific establishments.

Seed money would come from the European Union to get the labs, companies and entrepreneurs working together – through an independently managed programme office. After a pilot phase, ATTRACT will grow, working to enlist private and other funders with the capital and expertise necessary to bring these new technologies to market more quickly.

The founding organisations include CERN, ESO, EMBL, ESRF, ILL and the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser facility near Hamburg, Germany – as well as Aalto and ESADE. ATTRACT is gathering industrial supporters now. To get it started, the ATTRACT partners are seeking pilot phase funding in 2016/17 from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme.

Why ATTRACT?

• ATTRACT can deliver new technologies for global markets. The expertise and inventions at its biggest labs are an unparalleled resource – but need an ecosystem around them for investment, entrepreneurship and innovation. ATTRACT creates a necessary framework for this difficult, high-specification technology to move out of the lab and into the market.

• ATTRACT can get more value from Europe’s science base. The EU and its member-states have a deep, long-standing investment in these high-end labs. This has already paid off scientifically, but ATTRACT can multiply the returns in new, economic ways.

• ATTRACT can help strengthen European institutions. ATTRACT partner labs spread across the EU. Working together with local companies and investors, they can create a new, economically powerful ecosystem from north to south, west to east.

• ATTRACT can engage many more citizens in science and technology – as entrepreneurs, customers, or students. It can strengthen Europe’s talent base.

www.attract-eu.orgContact: ross.melzer@sciencebusiness.netScience|Business is a communications partner in this initiative

Aalto University

CERN

European Molecular Biology Laboratory

ESADE Business & Law Schools

European Southern Observatory

The European Synchrotron

The European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser

Institut Laue-Langevin

PROJECT PARTNERS