Science and Technology (SciTech) projects are strategic research projects with the primary purpose of building up research capacity and education capacity at the universities. Science and Technology projects will address one or more key challenges in society which will be potentially instrumental in achieving increased national economic growth and welfare. This includes possible challenges for businesses and the public sector.
The aim is to create theoretical and/or methodological breakthroughs to advance the field of the researched topic(s) and provide a foundation for subsequent bridge projects jointly with public institutions and industrial partners and thus to create impact and visibility.
Science and Technology projects will have an instrumental role in attracting and developing talent, covering both research excellence and research leadership.
Science and Technology projects run for 3-4 years with focus on one or more of the core thematic topics of DIREC depending on the nature of the societal challenge and research disciplines.
Bridge projects are joint research/development/innovation projects between universities, companies, the public sector and GTS institutes with the primary purpose to increase the capacity of digitalisation and innovation for companies. Bridge projects run for 1-4 years with a focus of either disseminating knowledge and new technology from universities to companies or disseminating challenges and cases from companies (and industries) to universities.
Bridge projects will have an instrumental role in creating value for companies as well as society, and they will develop talent covering both tech-trans and insights into business opportunities based on new business models. IP rights for each project will be handled by collaboration agreements.
Explore projects are small agile research projects with the purpose to quickly screen new ideas within or between the core thematic topics of DIREC – possibly in relation to specific challenges of companies or society.
Explore projects run for 1-6 months with a focus on identifying and creating new research challenges and areas. Typically, an explore project will bring together researchers of different seniority (professors, post-docs and PhD students), from different core disciplines and often with collaboration of invited external researchers in order to identify new research challenges on the boarder of established research areas – or to explore the potential of using new research and technology for practical application. In addition, we will suggest companies and public organisations to invite students (graduates and PhDs) to explore the potential of using new research and technology for practical application with more or less free hands in order to demonstrate the value of experimenting with new technologies.
The DIREC education activities will support master and PhD capacity building and the exploitation of capacity in industry and society. In particular:
- Create educational activities at the master and PhD level in digital technologies for building knowledge and research capacity that address Danish needs and with paths for capacity exploitation
- Create attractive international profile to foster inbound PhD recruitment.
DIREC will address these challenges focusing on the following objectives:
- increase the number of master and PhD graduates
- address and actively work towards improving gender diversity
- strengthen researcher-student-industry collaboration to support exploitation of capacity.
To support value creation (both short-term e.g. business value and long-term e.g. societal value) and the commercialization of the research carried out in DIREC, we support projects with focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship brings results from the DIREC research to market and supports start-up initiatives.
