Corporate Innovation Days 2019
Around 90 company representatives, researchers and students discussed how the interplay between sustainability and digitalisation will develop in the future at the 2019 Corporate Innovation Days took place at SDC on 2-3 December.
For the third time SDC hosted this event. This year it took place on December 2-3 and was co-organized together with the Innovation Centre Denmark and the Danish Chamber of Commerce in China. The two-day conference was held at SDC, and had participants from Danish, Chinese and international companies such as Novo Nordisk, Grundfos, Kopenhagen Fur, Goldwind, SF Group, Foton and Daimler as well as academia and government organisations.
A global agenda
The topic of this year’s Corporate Innovation Days was sustainability and digitalisation, and Martin Bech, Innovation Attaché at Innovation Centre Denmark in Shanghai, who co-organise the event, believes the topic is exceptionally relevant.
“Sustainability and digitalisation are obviously huge topics on the global agenda, and they are topics that the Nordic countries and businesses are particularly focussed on. Combine that with the fact that they are topics that are enormously important to China’s transition from producing economy to innovation economy, while keeping an economic, social and environmental balance”, says Martin Bech.
Narrowing the gap between academia and the industries
Dmitrij Slepniov, who is head of the Master’s degree programme in Innovation Management, was among the key organisers of the conference. Among his take-aways was the importance of the dialogue in the ‘Triple Helix’ setting involving business, academia and government.
“The discussions showed how differently the subjects of sustainability and digitalisation are perceived by these three parties and we need to continue narrowing the gap”, says Dmitrij Slepniov and continues.
“Other take-aways are of course SDC visibility among our partners, stimulation of our outreach, opportunities for our partners to network with researchers and students, but also among themselves. And that is why it is important for us to continue with Corporate Innovation Days positioning SDC on the map as an open and engaging academic institution.”
Tapping into extremely in-depth knowledge
Mathias Andersen, strategist in the Ecosystems and Partnerships team at Grundfos, took part in the event and also gave a presentation on how they work with digital transformation at Grundfos.
“The conference was well structured and I was impressed by the level of the participants from both Chinese and international companies. It was very interesting to get an insight into the way different industries have different experiences with digitalisation and sustainability.
It is very important that academia and the industries are linked and this event narrows the gap. It was also very interesting to be able to tap into the minds of the researchers, who have extremely in-depth knowledge on some quite specific fields,” says Mathias, who hopes to participate again in the future.