The Insiders’ Guide to Industry Engagement
Anita Heward, Editor of the Europlanet Magazine, introduces a special focus on industry and the importance of academia-industrial links for the planetary science community.
Read article in the fully formatted PDF of the Europlanet Magazine.
This issue of the Europlanet Magazine focuses on engagement with industry. Developing better links and partnerships with the commercial sector has been a core objective of Europlanet for many years. Having a credible industrial engagement strategy is also now a key part of the impact and exploitation sections of many research grant proposals, such as Horizon Europe.
Nonetheless, a 2021 Europlanet survey showed that, for many in the planetary science community, it can be unclear exactly how to go about starting an industrial collaboration, or what the benefits might be on either side.
The following articles have been contributed by partners from both academia and industry, and aim to show different approaches to collaboration and the potential impacts that can arise. The first two articles give the perspectives of an individual and an organisation to developing industrial engagement strategies, highlighting some of their experiences, successes and lessons learned. The other four articles are contributed by organisations that have taken a commercial approach to various aspects of planetary science: a service to deliver scientific data to the community, a start-up to support low-cost exploration of Mars, a spin-out company to apply space innovations to terrestrial challenges, and a laboratory offering state-of-the-art analytical services to the research community.
While these articles give a snapshot of some of the different types of industry collaboration – and hopefully some inspiration and ideas – they are by no means the whole picture. The space sector is a diverse ecosystem ranging from international enterprises to SMEs and covering upstream technology providers and downstream data services. Past issues of the Europlanet Magazine includes further examples of how a data analysis company has supported the development of Machine Learning tools for planetary science cases and how involvement in Europlanet Joint Research Activities has helped increase the sensitivity of commercial isotope analysis instrumentation.
In a changing world, where partnerships and supply chains are being rapidly revised, it has never been more important to think ‘outside the box’, to discover the creativity and expertise of the innovators working in our field, and to understand the mutual benefits of building links between academia and the commercial sector.
