Shifting focus to our industrial partners

The Eclipse Arrowhead project involves more than eighty partners with more than half of them coming from the industrial sector. When it comes to research findings from the project, these are well documented through scientific publications and conference presentations, classic forms of dissemination in academia – but dissemination is carried out differently in different contexts.

In order to highlight important research and design developments from industrial partners, Peter Craamer and Jokin Bilbao, of automation and electrical engineering specialist MSI, wanted to find a format that is more clearly directed at current and future markets. 

Peter explains the challenges that he and Jokin discussed in finding suitable forms of dissemination:

“Industrial partners are not always interested in producing communication material on project results, they might do it if it is already a final product, but not on partial results. We wanted to promote, stimulate and support making the progress of the project in the industrial sector visible.”

R&D activities are generally focused on product development and technical advances. This means that publication or dissemination is not necessarily a priority or even considered a potential result of the development process. Peter elaborates:

“When a final product has been developed, companies might provide marketing information on their own website, but this might not be clearly linked to the project or the process, so we wanted to create a framework to highlight the role that the project is playing in these developments.” 

After discussing potential ways of disseminating this information in a way that is useful for Eclipse Arrowhead’s industrial partners, that reaches a wider audience and that also highlights key aspects of the project, Peter and Jokin settled on creating a series of leaflets that will be published over the coming weeks and months. 

In their technical role in the Arrowhead Eclipse project, MSI is involved in the development of a process data generator (PDG) that fills the gap of lack of data during the engineering process by ensuring that complete sets of data are available in a timely fashion. When asked about their experiences of participating in such a large and diverse project as Arrowhead Eclipse, Peter and Jokin admit having felt an initial sense of apprehension. They wondered if such a heterogeneous group of partners would be able to be efficiently coordinated. At the halfway point of the project they now see the benefits that lie beyond the challenges. They describe the project as consisting of many “eye opening moments” as a result of the many perspectives and approaches that often encourages partners to look at things from a different angle or question the standard ways of doing things in their particular field.