Toolbox to support ERICs in their engagement with industry.
Creators: name: Kinhult, Pia
name: Zullino, Sara
name: Galeotti, Marco
name: van der Lek, Iulianna
name: Vainio, Susanne
name: Joubert, Anne-Charlotte
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025

description: This report assesses and gives recommendations for how the European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERICs), today including 30 organisations, can develop fruitful collaborations with industry. One important goal when the ERICs are showing clearly their importance as strategic assets for achieving scientific, technological and societal impact. The report shows why this is important by pointing at some important analyses done in the EU system and how challenges need to be met by using all parts of society together. Starting out by assessing and summarising what has been done in the last few years with the results of several relevant earlier projects, like ENVRIPlus, ENRIITC and ENVRI-fair, the working group has tried to gather what is most important. This results in both strategic and operative recommendations. The overall strategic engagement needs to foster a productive collaboration between research infrastructure and industry, based on understanding the industry’s needs, measuring results with relevant KPIs, finding mutual benefits for the collaboration and aligning with resources. To accomplish this objective, the RI must develop an innovation culture within the organisation. The report points to different ways of achieving this. Among many things, including appointing responsible functions, the constitution of advisory boards, and participation in regional and international clusters and networks Universities are important stakeholders, together with research and technology organisations (RTOs), in reaching the industry and bridging the gap between different actors in the innovation system. The Public-Private Partnership (PPP) way of working is described as a toolbox and attempts to cover all aspects of collaboration with industry. This is not a full account. The toolbox covers models and types of collaboration, some of the legal and regulatory considerations necessary and funding and financing of different variety, and includes:



Strategy for industry and innovation engagement starting with the primary interest of industry.

Multi-disciplinary, gender-balanced Industry Advisory Board.

A full-time Innovation/Industry Contact officer.

A Communications Office with commercial experience.

Identify the intermediaries (clusters, RTOs) relevant to the RI and set up Way of Working including both tuning the offer, filter companies and outreach activities.

Setting a target for how much cooperation with industry should ideally contribute to RI annual revenues.

Analys if the LIEPT Model is relevant to use, and if so, decide on scope, stakeholders and KPIs.

Set up a part/link web page designed to provide general information for industry and meet their special needs, promote success stories, offer a catalogue of services and collaboration models.

Set up an innovation helpdesk to act as an expertise centre providing access to essential tools for collaboration, such as guidelines on IP rights, open innovation and legal agreement templates.


The provided recommendations and toolbox are completed with cases to showcase how the work can be done.

More and more research infrastructures are engaging with industry and thus could benefit from this toolbox and the described approaches. In some areas, industry is more advanced than academia and can form strong alliances to remain at the forefront of technological and scientific innovation.

Collaboration is key to securing Europe’s position as a global leader and addressing future societal challenges. ERICs must embrace more efficient partnerships with industry and leverage the wealth of existing knowledge to achieve this. The working group hopes that this toolbox will serve as a valuable resource to initiate and guide these efforts.