Benz? I would have loved to have an Irgens

I have an old British sports car, an MGB, that I brought with me from Portland when I moved to Vancouver in 1995, and then all the way to Oslo fifteen years later. Obviously I must be very fond of it, dragging it with me half way across the globe, but still, I would have prefered to drive around in an Irgens.

Paul Henning Irgens started a mechanical workshop in Oslo in the late 1870s. In 1880 he had a design for an internal combustion engine and plans for a gasoline-powered car. He built a boat engine, patented a gas turbine engine, and tried to find investors to start commercial car production. But there was no one who saw the need for a horse-drawn carriage, and Irgens was unable to build his car before 1887. The same year, Benz began commercial production of power-driven cars in Germany.  

In 1895, Irgens moved his workshop to Bergen and built "Alpha", a bus the authorities did not allow on public roads; they thought it was too heavy (with 20 passengers) and too fast (with a top speed of 15 kilometers per hour).

Some years later, between 1920 and 1925, did H.C. Bjerring build a car for the special conditions in the southeastern interior of Norway, where the roads were so narrow in winter that ordinary cars could not be used. The Bjerring car was particularly narrow. It had the engine behind the driver and the single passenger behind the engine, and you could replace the front wheels with skis. But soon the roads got wider, snow removal more effective, and Bjerring's market disappeared.

Per Kohl-Larsen started in 1955 a consortium in Lier, also in Norway, to build "Troll", the first car outside the United States with fiberglass carrosserie. But Kohl-Larsen did not get permission from Norwegian authorities to sell more than fifteen cars in the Norwegian market - because they feared that a Norwegian car industry would jeopardize trade agreements with the Soviet Union on exports of Norwegian fishmeal in return for imports of East European cars.

My last example is from 1973, when father and son Ringdal, owners of a bakelite factory at Aurskog in Norway, got the idea of making an electric car with a plastic body. Around the turn of the century, they launched the TH!NK Classic, a two-seat city car that was sold in one thousand copies. And to make a long and complicated story short, and maybe a bit unfair, only die-hard environmentalists would proudly be photographed in front of their TH!INK.  

The result was not much more than chapters in a small book on the history of Norwegian car industry, a TROLL at the Norwegian Vehicle History Museum in Lillehammer, and a series of lost opportunities.

Irgens, Bjerke, Kohl-Larsen and Ringdal had many talents, but talents are not enough. In order to  successfully build a businesses, you need an environent of comptencies and resources you cannot and should not develop yourself, in areas like funding, market penetration, taxation, design, and export, to name a few. We know the phrase that "it takes a village to raise a child". Well, it takes a well-developed ecosystem to make an entrepreneur successful.

It takes a village...

Today we know that entrepreneurship is not a single-person heroic effort. Therefore, most governments are concerned with how they can contribute.  Universities work with companies and startups. Today it is easier to find information and it is easier to reach markets. We understand better which skills we need. There is greater access to smart capital. The technological development has made production in high-cost countries like Norway and Sweden possible again. And today, we understand better how the public, businesses, investors, entrepreneurs and universities take different roles in an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

But in Europe, this ecosystem does not work as well as it should.  Smart and risk-willing capital is in shorter supply, public procurement is usually not a tool for encouraging innovation, labor mobility is low, privacy legislation slow down innovative health applications, the retirement systems reduce mobility, public R&D support (both for industry and academia) are better suited to supporting existing strengths than new sectors and new areas, most countries have spread the responsibility fro research and innovation  across several ministries, hindering effective strategies and coordination, few countries have dedicated digitalization and ICT ministries, .... and the university sectors have not embraced their role in this ecosystem.

The role of universities

Universities have a well-defined role in the value chain from research to value creation, developing and disseminating knowledge in a long-term perspective, primarily in terms of research and education.   We do, however, see a strong wish and need to establish a more prominent role for the universities in the national research innovation policies, as more active players in the innovation ecosystems. Sometimes this is called the universities' third role; where teaching and research are the two first

However, that is not easy. Developing knowledge is done in a global scientific collegium of scientific peers who discuss their research in conferences, project meetings and journals, and from this produce more than two million scientific articles a year that next to nobody read. This, of course, is a highly ineffective way to turn the creation of new knowledge into innovations and value for society.

Europe's national governments and the European Commission fund well-structured research programs with innovation components in an attempt at creating more immediate societal value.  In addition, universities try to stimulate their professors to compete for these funds, move innovation and entrepreneurship into the defines learning outcomes, and establish makerspaces, incubators, technology transfer offices, industry collaborations, and increased focus on relevance and impact of the research projects.

Attempts at making this more efficient and effective could hardly be called revolutionary, it is primarily attempted by cultivating some kind of blurry or porosity in the distinction between research and application, hoping for results through osmosis.

While the big numbers help (there are around thirty million students in higher education in Europe and millions of researchers),  this is still an ineffective way to turn research into innovation.

One reason for this may be the universities' centuries-old traditions, which in some ways have put them among the least innovative institutions in society. Their third role has only recently begun to emerge, and must find its place in a tradition that is proud of its absence.

Another reason for this is probably that, in the end, the universities and their employees are not being measured and rewarded to work with innovation. My institution was only this year accredited as a university (until then we were classified as a university college).  While the requirements were many and very demanding, there was not a single innovation requirement among them. Even if I have the responsibility for the development of innovation at our university, I put this work aside until the accreditation process was completed.

Now that we are accredited, I work to strengthen this activity. But the reality is that if I ask an associate professor to spend more time on innovation activities, I am in reality taking her away from activities that are necessary and important to become a full professor.

In order to strengthen innovation activity at universities, whether it is through organizational strategies or individual career developments, we must change how the universities and academics are measured and rewarded. The third mission of universities is increasingly acknowledged and supported in the universities, but Europe needs a stronger third-stream policy and funding. How this should be done without reducing our work to strengthen the quality and volume of research and education, is another discussion.  

Maybe then I could get an Irgens.