Big and important industries like the oil and gas industry have changed radically the previous years. The public sector is undergoing a process to increase efficiency in their services in order to meet the requirements of the society in a better way. Globalisation and robotisation will change the labour market and our everyday life as we know it today, in ways we have not yet identified.
In other words, the need for new products, services and processes is present.
You can find The BTO Annual report for 2016 here
Together with the research institutions in Bergen, entrepreneurs, investors, established industries and the authorities we work actively on solving the challenges of tomorrow.
A specific example of the cooperation is BTO’s interaction with the innovation clusters GCE Subsea, NCE Maritime CleanTech, NCE Seafood Innovation Cluster, Design Arena and NCE Media. In 2016, the four first-mentioned clusters have chosen to locate their offices together with BTO to ensure improved utilisation of resources and to develop a closer cooperation on the projects. NCE Media and BTO are in close dialogue with each other regarding co-location in Media City Bergen. BTO wants to stimulate to increased innovation in the clusters by contributing with our competence and network. Cooperation on the innovation programme ACCEL, contribution of competence when writing applications, access to funding and workplaces in our incubators are examples of what BTO can offer to the clusters.
In October, the City Councillor for Climate, Culture and Industry Julie Andersland (V) announced that Bergen Teknologioverføring receives 1,5 million kroner in contribution, to assist the Municipality of Bergen with challenges related to readjustment. BTO is a part of the Municipality of Bergen’s package of measures against unemployment and improvement of innovation stimulation. The funding will strengthen our efforts on areas that our environment is already working on.
We are already working on implementing specific activities related to readjustment, actions to improve growth in start-ups and to make use of new tools in green business development. The potential for making use of job seekers, redundant and students in start-ups is highly relevant. This represents a win-win situation generating increased regional value added.
One of the areas of commitment for BTO in 2016 was user and service innovation, and a business developer was employed to work on these kinds of projects. The ambition is to contribute to increased value adding by focusing on user involvement and by focusing on services being designed with and not only for people. In 2016, we were involved in about 20 projects within user and service innovation.
Our mission is to be a centre of competence for innovation and commercialisation of research results. This includes managing of our owners’ and other immaterial rights and interests related to research results and research processes. BTO will continue to execute evaluations, consult and provide administrative needs related to a possible commercialisation, in addition to other activities naturally related to this. This is achieved by efficient commercialisation processes, active development of culture and great attitudes.