Till Lech of SINTEF Digital new Innovation Director

NorwAI’s new Innovation Director:

Wants to overcome the boundaries for research-driven innovation

Till Christopher Lech joined the core team of NorwAI as Innovation Director in August this year. The experienced senior research scientist has a demonstrated history of working in the research industry. In SINTEF Digital the last seven years Till Lech has headed the "Smart Data" Research group in SINTEF Digital's department of Sustainable Communication Technologies (SCT).

Till Lech on stage — Till Lech chaired the Innovation session at the NorwAI Innovate Conference in September.
The new Innovation Director also presented the work of “Compliance by Design” in his talk about the
impact of regulations for the digital economy. Photo: Kai T. Dragland, NTNU

- What is your focus in the new position, Till?

- Right now, we are looking very much forward to the upcoming NorwAI Forum in Oslo on Nov.14. You see, our ambition is to re-ignite the innovation work in the center, says Till.

NorwAI Forum is organized twice every year as an internal event for the partners of NorwAI. Wheras the spring Trondheim Forum concentrate on research questions; the agenda of the autumn Oslo event is on innovation.

NorwAI Innovation 2.0

Till Lech says there is a lot of groundbreaking research being done at NorwAI. And the research center has some of Norway’s most innovative companies as partners.

– I think there is a lot to be gained if we manage to tie this even closer together. We branded this process as “NorwAI Innovation 2.0”, aiming at identifying, recognizing and overcoming the boundaries for research-driven innovation in our ecosystem.

Another key question in innovation processes is use cases. Till Lech leaves no doubt on his postion:

- Use cases will be an all-important tool to connect the dots between research and innovation. Many of the initial use cases have been evolved, others have become obsolete, and it’s time to take a new look at them to position our industry partners as demanding customers to the research community in the center, says the new Innovation Director.

His team will spend the weeks leading up to NorwAI Forum to have good conversations with both researchers and industry partners to collect input and polish the agenda.

Flow of data

- Another thing that we would like to discuss at NorwAI forum is the flow of data in the center – or the lack thereof. We know that it is not always easy for industry to share data with researchers, and we pretty much know why this is the case.

According to Till, in general it boils down to

technical and cost issues (getting data out of silos, preparing/transforming it into a form that is useful, interoperability),
organizational issues (lack of a clear upside of sharing data, fear of exposing trade secrets or losing control of the assets once shared) and
legal/regulatory issues (am I allowed to share this dataset? What are the potential liabilities?).

- And, look, we know that we cannot solve all of these issues at once, but we need to take some first steps, like, for example, getting a better contractual framework into place (data transfer agreements) that ensure better compliance with industry requirements, he says.

- And in addition, there needs to be an infrastructure for trusted sharing, storage, and processing of industry data. These are some of the items we want to take a closer look at on November 14. We really do hope that as many of the NorwAI partners as possible will be there, says Till Lech.

2024-10-29

By Rolf D. Svendsen