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Close collaboration with academia in Sweden

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

It is one of CLOSER’s aims to be a national and neutral arena for collaboration within transport efficiency. By gathering together academia, industry and the public sector, we create new collaborations and projects that develop and disseminate knowledge about efficient transport services. In this article, we want to pay particular attention to academia, as they are a critical component in all of our efforts.

Some of CLOSER’s academic partners are Sweden’s most prominent universities, colleges and institutes within the transport and logistics research area and the most recent university to join us is Linköping University. Together with other Swedish universities and colleges, they are participating, for example, in a project about building logistics: CIVIC. The importance of cooperation between academia, industry and the public sector permeates the research, not only at Linköping University, and Mats Abrahamsson, Professor of Logistics and Quality Development at Linköping University, believes that CLOSER has an important role to play just here.

“Basically all the research that we conduct within the quality and logistics area is applied research and always occurs in collaboration with academia, industry and the public sector, and in accordance with the Triple Helix principles. We always look for the best networks and organizations to collaborate with. For instance, we have a VINNOVA project on business models for city logistics where CLOSER is involved by contributing its knowledge in the area and to organize arenas where researchers, and in this case, municipalities and other stakeholders can meet, to enter more deeply into the important issues. But it is also an opportunity to capture potential problems that can occur and that research needs to address,” says Mats.

“Research is a critically important piece of the jigsaw and in CLOSER’ efforts in project facilitation we endeavor to always involve our academic partners to guarantee well-founded project results in research, before during and after a project,” says Sofie Vennersten, program responsible at CLOSER.

Network for young researchers in transport efficiency

In another area of CLOSER’s efforts, within the framework of research collaboration, a network for young researchers has been initiated. During the year, efforts to map and interview people from CLOSER’s academic partners have taken place, as well as from municipal and industrial partners, with the aim of identifying needs and opportunities.

“During the autumn we held our first networking event and will now continue to build up the network in different ways. To start off we will focus on creating contacts and sharing information at a project center, but the ambition is to also arrange physical meetings during next year,” says Maria Lindholm, Coordinator for the research network at CLOSER.

If you are interested in joining the network, please contact Maria Lindholm, maria.lindholm@lindholmen.se