AGRO has a focus on collaboration with the industry

In September DCA held the successful event  in Foulum ”International Biorefining Seminar & Partnering Workshop” with the participation of employees from AGRO. The seminar was an excellent example of the concept I wrote about in an earlier edition of Biweekly in the article Increased attention to collaboration with private companies, namely ”Brainnovation”. This is a concept that ST has launched for helping industry and research meet each other.  

The event attracted researchers and companies from 17 countries and gave the guests the chance to participate in a series of workshops where they could meet and network with European colleagues. The workshops dealt with subjects such as new cropping systems, transformation of biomass to fuel and other high value products, and the use of green biomass for the production of protein for pigs and poultry. There were also visits to our fields with bioenergy crops and other large-scale facilities. You can read about the seminar in the article European visitors expressed great enthusiasm for AU Foulum.

The seminar is an example of how networking between researchers and businesses can be made more visible and strengthened. ST’s Business Collaboration Committee gives financial support to this kind of event. Feel free to send me an e-mail or call me if you have ideas for an event such as this. 

The Business Collaboration Committee website

ST has refreshed the Business Collaboration Committee’s website, which can be viewed here. The website is targeted companies that seek collaborative partners and is intended as a simple and quick access to the faculty’s activities. 

Among other things, the website describes the various ways of collaborating (research collaboration, educational collaboration, PhD and Industrial PhD collaboration, student projects and traineeships, access to research facilities, etc.). 

Increasing awareness of AGRO’s business collaboration

Under the menu bar ”Business relations” you can find a list of the various departments – with the Department of Agroecology at the top of the list.  

It is important that we in the department raise awareness of our great commitment to collaborating with the industry. This can be done in various ways, including on AGRO’s own website, DCA’s website and ST’s website. 

DCA’s website access to business collaboration describes, among other things, concrete cases, including one from AGRO (Case: New high-value, multifunctional crops for organic farmers). There is room for more. Additional case articles could deal with current collaboration, results achieved, or examples of how our research has strengthened a collaborative partner’s competences and business.  

I would therefore like to encourage you to contribute examples and send a short description with a couple of good quality, illustrative photos to Janne Hansen or me, so that we can raise awareness of our exciting activities.

It is also important to describe our facilities. Business collaboration often begins because we have special equipment that potential partners would like to know more about or would like to have access to. It is therefore relevant for us to describe our facilities. Check the Business Collaboration Committee website to see if there is equipment that should be described but is not and send me an e-mail.