On research impacts. Risto Ritala Tampere University of Technology. Academy of Finland meeting Sept 20th, My background a mixed bag

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Edmund Armstrong
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1 On research impacts Risto Ritala Tampere University of Technology Academy of Finland meeting Sept 20th, 2016 My background a mixed bag 2003 present; professor TUT, Measurement Information Systems TUT representative at Metsäklusteri Oy, FIBIC (board member 2013) Two AKA projects ( ; ), Senior Scientist Project (2011) Scientific Coordinator in a EU/FP5 project VP Research, Finnish Pulp and Paper Research Institute (KCL) Approx. 100 researcher organization Managing Director, KCL Development Oy Startup: from 2 persons to approx 20 persons KCL, researcher/research manager 1986 PhD in theoretical physics, TKK (Aalto) 1

2 My points 1. Curiosity driven vs impact driven research 2. Future is hard to predict the harder the further in time Scenarios Balanced portfolio for a research funding agency For a research group Curiosity driven research Answer a scientific, intellectually challenging research question If you are lucky, there will be an impact but a large portion of this research will never be impacting our lives on the other hand, occasionally there will be a huge, unexpected impact. Great that someone was curious about Radio technology in 1970s Finland lived out of it for 20+ years Islamic culture in 1980s and 1990s this is needed in economic and political world today Unexpected (smallish) impact from our research activities Curious about how to operate sensing degrees of freedom in probabilistic robotics -> training approx 150 decision makers on decision analysis under dynamics and uncertainty (Finnish Defense, SOTE, TUKES, municipalities, private sector) 2

3 Impact driven research Impact a given business objective Be prepared to abandon your scientific objective/hypothesis when solving this Replan the remaining part of the project every day (deadline and budget given) Hard for the researchers to accept Even harder for research consortia to accept Characteristic to the most succesful impact driven research I have been involved with is that the approach has been radically changed during the project Radical change of approach during the project, personal experience In a project to improve papermaking efficiency with an expert system on process data Change: forget about the expert system more relevant is to arrange the data easily for process engineers and operators, and coorporate experts Result: a product (Industrial Internet?) launched and commercialized in 1994; by 1999 in use at 40+ production lines in Europe; currently still widely used, also outside pulp and paper Rather often today a project must have both a fixed research question and a fixed intended impact My opinion is that this leads via a lack of degrees of freedom to inferior performance 3

4 OK: Agencies funding mainly curiosity driven research (AKA) are expected to analyze the impact of the investment the society has made The funding decisions are investments under high uncertainties Financial mathematics: a balanced portfolio This is equivalent to the approach of venture capitalists: place 30 bets with the idea that 2-3 win big and the others provide no profit This is quite different from ideas such as we should concentrate our [long-term] research funding to areas that are most important and promising Note: A research group being a small entity cannot balance its portfolio, so it just sticks with its (scientific) research questions. One way of more analytic approach towards the balanced portfolio: scenarios Multiple scenarios Curiosity driven research may be seen to have a potential impact on world in some scenarios should not be expected to impact all or even most scenarios How to make good scenarios 10 year perspective, 30 years In 2002 a scenario definition for pulp and paper industry was commissioned 4

5 One way of more analytic approach towards the balanced portfolio: scenarios Multiple scenarios Curiosity driven research may be seen to impact world in some scenarios should not be expected to impact all or even most scenarios How to make good scenarios 10 year perspective, 30 years In 2002 a scenario definition for pulp and paper industry was commissioned Research has been conducted based on this Personal feeling: what has had real impact is what I had left out without the scenario analysis My points 1. Curiosity driven vs impact driven research 2. Future is hard to predict the harder the further in time Scenarios Balanced portfolio for a research funding agency For a research group 5

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