Out of office and into real problem-solving. How GreenLab’s Research Community Days help break down silos
GreenLab’s Research Community Days started as an experiment to provide a forum for researchers and companies involved in GreenLab projects. The aim was to create a space where they could discuss their progress, share ideas, and troubleshoot with their peers. Now, the bimonthly meetings have become exactly the inspiring environment GreenLab R&D hoped for.
“If it’s complex, it can’t be solved by one person at a desk”
GreenLab works with mission-driven research – that means research characterized by ambitious targets, by wanting to solve big and difficult challenges, and by having a multi-stakeholder, interdisciplinary approach to so-called wicked problems. That’s why the research projects that take place in the green industrial park involve both university researchers and industrial companies that need solutions to concrete challenges. From the beginning, it has been the ambition to create a research platform that was fundamentally different from that of a university. “If problems are complex, they can’t be solved by one person at a desk”, says Ebbe Kruse Vestergaard, GreenLab’s Research Director. “We knew we had to find a way to break down the walls between different academic fields to start a conversation that could lead to new ideas and solutions. That’s how we came up with the idea of Research Community Days”.
Work-in-progress presentations and curious questions
On GreenLab’s Research Community Days, researchers are invited to come not with their polished presentations, but with the research they are currently working on, and equal time is provided for questions and discussion as for presentations. Often, there will be a mix between workshops lead by industry experts (GreenLab site partners) and academic experts. This creates a close connection between academia and industry, allowing research to be closer to the relevant industrial problems and industrial experts to make connections with researchers looking to solve the problems they are facing at a societal level.
The power of getting out of the office
Leon Aahave Uhd is a senior executive officer at DTU, GreenLab’s primary university partner in the research funded by the Villum Foundation. To him, it has been interesting to see the effect of moving researchers out of their DTU offices in Copenhagen.
“People can sit less than 100 meters from each other every day on campus without exchanging ideas, and then they come to a field in the Northern part of Jutland, and suddenly they are discussing solutions to complex problems from their different academic perspectives. I think that is really the power of these community days”, he says. Eoghan Rattigan, GreenLab’s industrial sustainability scientist and organizer of the Research Community Days, agrees: “At GreenLab, researchers have conversations across the boundaries of their institute and beyond the walls of the university. They meet peers that come at a problem from a different angle than them, and they meet the companies who will use their research in real life eventually", he says.
Keep an eye on GreenLab's website to see when the next event takes place.
