Building a Pathway Between Estonian Universities and Companies
Do we need to establish a Technical Research Centre of Estonia?
The Government of Estonia has done a marvellous job in spreading the story of e-Estonia. One showing Estonia as the most digitally advanced nation in the world. Leading to hundreds of delegations visiting Estonia annually. All coming to learn from this innovative community in Northern Europe.
There is a lot of basis to the stories. After all, we were able to build our government from scratch, without any legacy systems. Thus having the opportunity to omit bureaucracy when building a connected governing system. One where it took me less than 60 seconds to file my taxes for 2018.
Estonia is also the birthplace for the highest number of unicorns per capita. These are privately held companies valued at over $1 billion. But better yet, we have helped to shape the foundation for many awesome technologies. Our favourites include blockchain, cybersecurity, fintech, machine learning and robotics.
But not everything is as awesome as it sounds. For one, we are yet to develop strong marketing skills. Moreover, we seem to be reaching the tipping point for finding any type of great talent from Estonia. And then there is the question of how to digitise our Industry companies and make them innovate.
Industry 4.0 — Everyone’s talking about it…
…but not that much is happening!
This problem is not unique to Estonian companies but the whole world seems to be talking about it. Heck, the same delegations visiting Estonia hope to find the answer from here. Only to realise that we do not have an answer for this either.
Everyone seems to have heard that the robots are coming. Some even believe this will change the status quo. But only so few have started to take the first steps towards adopting this new situation.
Not because the others do not accept it, but rather because they have not seen ready for use solutions. Nor have they the budgets to do research and development by themselves.
So the question is, how could we help them? Is there something the government can do to ensure the survival of our Industry? Because in Estonia we still create most value via agriculture, construction, fishing, manufacturing, timber and transport. And companies in those fields also keep most of our employees on pay. But unless we take those fields further, we will soon lose them to those that do.
In fact, we have already done a lot of research at our universities that could become the saviour. We have a lot of data that companies could use to make their procedures more efficient. We have the knowledge of how to build various automated systems that could help them. And we even have the research showing how they could make science-based innovation. So why cannot we already help them?
The answer lies in the Estonian university funding mechanisms. That said, the current system focuses on research articles published, not research applied. Leading to universities pushing their scientists only to discover new things. Without any need to apply the findings. Thus implementing only those that are a part of research projects with big funding.
Knowing this, a bunch of Estonian Industry leaders hired an outside consultant to come up with a plan. Or rather point us towards ideas that could help to change the situation. And his results included:
- Have the companies find money for self-financed R&D.
- Change the university funding mechanism to support research application.
- Generate a Technical Research Centre that takes existing research and helps to turn it into applications. For example, Finland has one named VTT whose mode we could copy.
We can easily ignore the first, as if this would be the answer, everyone would have already done it. Most likely the universities would not accept the second one either. So the best option at this point would be to go with the third option.
And that is what the Industry is now lobbying for.
Meanwhile, the universities do not want to accept this choice either.
Regardless, we must work on finding a way to change the status quo, as this does not work…
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