Industry engagement with academia is key to Swedish innovation
Carl Bennet leads discussion at PIEp seminar
Innovation
Competing with global innovation will require that Swedish business leaders look beyond quarterly earnings reports and focus on collaborative, long-term innovation development, industrialist Carl Bennet told participants at a recent seminar at KTH Innovation Studio.
Bennet, leader of Getinge Group global medical technology company and principal owner and Chairman of Getinge AB, discussed the importance of engagement between business and academia during a Q&A session at the January 24 seminar “Innovation in Collaboration Product Innovation – Results, Effects and Possibilities.” About 45 participants representing academia, business, foundations and government attended the half-day event, which was hosted by the Product Engineering Innovation program (PIEp) at KTH.
The event included a progress report on PIEp’s research projects, which focus on innovation management, and a presentation by the product innovation professor, Mats Magnusson, whose position is funded by Bennet’s donation to KTH.
Discussions focused on the building of a targeted approach to innovation, with strong cooperation between a variety of players including business and academia. Other speakers included Emil Görnerup from Svenskt Näringsliv; Magnus Karlsson, Director of New Business Development & Innovation at Ericsson; PIEp PhD students Carl Wadell and Katarina Lund; and Tord Karlin from Micronic Mydata.
Bennet pointed to Finland, Denmark and Germany as role models for Swedish business to follow, in order to compete with innovation-driven economies such as those in Asia. “In order to cope with the tougher competition, we need to act more in terms of a ‘Sweden AB’ – a community-oriented holistic engagement,” he said.
The seminar was organized by Margareta Norell Bergendahl, KTH Professor of Integrated Product Development, and Sofia Ritzén, the head of the KTH School of Industrial Engineering’s Department of Integrated Product Development, who say Bennet’s insights were the highlight of a four-hour session which ran over schedule due to the energetic group discussions that followed. “Carl Bennet is very important not only because of the donations that enabled us to build a unique platform for working with innovation issues, but because of his engagement and commitment to collaboration between academia and industry,” Ritzén says.
“Carl pointed out the importance of engagement from Swedish industry which is truly supportive in the efforts of driving changes for increased innovation capability,” she says.