Considering to collaborate

“Impact for a better society” is the central mission of TU Delft. Building on an excellent scientific profile in science, engineering and design we offer knowledge-intensive, technology-driven solutions to societal challenges. These solutions are rooted in ground breaking research: research that makes us an attractive cooperation partner for other knowledge institutes, society and for businesses.

With this approach we are at interplay with the changing drivers at European, national and regional level. Horizon Europe and national topsector policies will be driven by societal missions and key enabling technologies (KETs). Within these missions and KETs lie opportunities for universities and businesses to engage and to set the scene for future society and future economy. However, this can only be achieved by long term mutual commitment. For this reason the focus within Horizon Europe and national funding schemes (NWO) will be increasingly on long term public private partnerships.

The aim of TU Delft is to grow as a public private innovation campus and this can only be achieved by strong interaction with the city of Delft, the wider region, Innovation Quarter and the province. Through regional budgets like EFRD and national budgets for regional initiatives a strong regional embedding of national and European innovation efforts is ensured. These means help us to create strong regional ecosystems of universities, larger businesses, SME’s, start-ups and scale-ups. At TU Delft these ecosystems are arising around topics like Quantum technology (i.e. Quantum Campus) and Artificial Intelligence/Robotics (i.e. RoboValley).

As a publicly funded university TU Delft attaches great importance to the general principles according to which our projects are carried out. There are important considerations for industry to reflect upon when contemplating to initiate research projects with us

First of all, TU Delft has an obligation to disseminate knowledge to society. Therefore all research results of TU Delft must be made available for publication. Therein we adhere to the standards of scientific integrity1 as established by the VSNU.

Second, As an academic institution TU Delft may not be restricted in its freedom to pursue research. We also have a societal obligation to train the next generation of inventors and innovators. Therefore, patent-protected project results shall always be available to TU Delft itself for teaching and academic research projects.

Finally, at TU Delft Open Science is seen as an important way to spread TU Delft’s mission to deliver Science to Society. With Open Science we wish to make scientific knowledge accessible online, free of charge to all users. This way new ideas are spread faster and wider, which in turn lead to new research.

Examples of this approach can be seen in the generation of publicly available open source software, open access papers and MOOCs. But also in the establishment of open and collaborative ecosystems such as SAM|XL2 or RoboValley3. In all this we do understand the need for proper protection of intellectual property to secure the correct and viable introduction of our ideas, findings and software into society. After all, open source software is useless to society when an incorrect license is applied. And no start-up or spin-off will survive long enough to bring a product to the market if these innovations are not cradled and protected by patent rights.

1 www.vsnu.nl/files/documents/Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity 2018.pdf 2 www.samxl.com 3 www.robovalley.com

Alongside the aforementioned means, we also bring inventions and findings into society by transferring the intellectual property rights to industry.

We deeply value our collaborations with industry, many of whom we have long-standing relations with deeply rooted in joint history. We are always open to welcome new partners, to explore new domains and establish new joint ventures, either through bilateral agreements or within the framework of, amongst others, Horizon Europe, national top sector funding, NWO and regional funding.

For industry partners who are looking for a strategic collaboration in which we will explore together the opportunities of different technologies and strive to co-creation towards innovations, we developed the X!Delft formula. The strategic partners who are a member of X!Delft all want to take their responsibility in creating ‘impact for a better society’ and will do so by looking for collaboration and in joint effort using the technology as an accelerator.

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