Industry engagement ELIXIR’s Industry engagement aims to bridge the gap between industry and academia by creating opportunities for knowledge exchange, networking and collaborations. It supports researchers in industry and academia to drive scientific advances through open innovation and FAIR data practices. ELIXIR SME and Innovation Forum The ELIXIR Innovation and SME Forum helps ELIXIR Nodes to engage with innovative companies in their respective countries. It further creates an opportunity for SMEs to showcase their services and research to an expert audience and create links with academics and industry participants. In 2019, three Innovation and SME Forums took place: • Data Management in the Life Sciences - a Driver for Innovation, 5-6 March 2019, Stockholm, Sweden • Distributed Data Analysis - The (Health) Data Train, 1011 October 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands • Genomics and Associated Data in National Healthcare Initiatives, 27-28 November 2019, Milan, Italy
New forum for academia and industry to address bioinformatics bottlenecks ELIXIR launched a new initiative to support collaboration with the bioinformatics industry - the ELIXIR Bioinformatics Industry Forum. This new series of events brings together providers and consumers of bioinformatics services (clouds, HPC clusters, analytics pipelines and others) to discuss existing bottlenecks and solutions to the challenges in working with biological data. The first event took place in May 2019 in London, organised with support from ATOS/Bull, Microsoft, Aridhia and Illumina. It attracted over 80 experts from 45 different organisations representing large IT companies, SMEs and academic researchers.
ELIXIR Finland and BC Platforms collaborate to support data standardization and access The main aim of ELIXIR’s Innovation and SME Forums is to encourage collaboration between large companies, SMEs and ELIXIR Nodes. A long-term impact survey of previous attendees in 2019 revealed that 82% of respondents indicated that the event facilitated new collaborations, 18% reported that it enhanced product development or publication of work. An example of a successful collaboration comes from BC Platforms, a genomic data management and analysis company from Finland. After attending the ELIXIR Innovation and SME Forum in Helsinki in January 2017 and talking with academics from ELIXIR Finland, they established a joint project with ELIXIR Finland. The progress of this collaboration was presented in March 2019 at another ELIXIR Innovation and SME Forum in Stockholm, Sweden. BC Platforms and ELIXIR Finland are working together on a platform that combines clinical and genome data from different sources, and without compromising patient privacy. ELIXIR Finland (Finish IT Center for Science – CSC) is providing their cloud and compute services which allows for automated processing and combination without having to worry about data conversions or data formats.
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ELIXIR Annual Report 2019
