A National Academic-Industrial Research Program with an Integrated Graduate Research School
ProViking® is a successful Swedish twelve-year research program in product development and production. Rather than to stimulate the emergence of new companies, it aims at strengthening the existing Swedish industry by producing scientific results at the h
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Abstract ProViking is a successful Swedish twelve-year research program in product development and production. Rather than to stimulate the emergence of new companies, it aims at strengthening the existing Swedish industry by producing scientific results at the highest international level and Ph.D.’s for work in the industry. ProViking comprises a large number of research projects, jointly run by universities and industrial companies, and a national graduate school which provides courses for the Ph.D. students that work in the projects. The total ProViking budget is close to 110 M€, of which 43 M€ is supplied by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and the rest by the industrial project partners. Since the program started in 2002, forty-one different research projects have so far resulted in several hundred conferences and journal papers. Some fifteen patents have either been granted or have applications pending as a result of the research, and almost one hundred Ph.D.’s have graduated. Keywords Research
Program Industrial Graduate School
G. Gustafsson (&) Department of Product and Production Development, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] L. Frenning PPU-ProViking, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]
A. Chakrabarti and R. V. Prakash (eds.), ICoRD’13, Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-1050-4_89, Springer India 2013
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G. Gustafsson and L. Frenning
1 Introduction Sweden is a small but highly industrialized country with many successful international companies. The increasing global competition in the last few decades in particular has however forced an increased emphasis on the development of new and better products as well as faster, cheaper and more efficient and environmentally friendly methods to conceive of, develop, design and produce them. In addition, the vast majority of the Swedish international companies were founded on the basis of inventions and innovations in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, so there was and still is also a strong consensus across the national political borders that Sweden needs to nurture its small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in order to create conditions which helps more of them to grow into large companies. The background for what will be presented in this paper was therefore a strong desire to stimulate in particular the development of Swedish SMEs, and to do this through academic-industrial cooperation which would even better than before utilize the knowledge and competence in the domestic universities to further improve Sweden’s international industrial competitiveness. The ProViking research program [1], which was launched in 2002, is an effort to strengthen the Swedish industry through a large number of research projects which involve academic as well as industrial partners with the intention that they shall produce useful scientific results at the highest international level. In addi
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