Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
President (Rector) Bo Sundqvist Presentation
President (Rector) Bo Sundqvist, Uppsala University, Sweden
Let me give a few comments on industry-university relations at Uppsala. Uppsala is situated north of Stockholm, about 40 minutes by train. It has two universities. One, Uppsala University, the oldest seat of learning in Scandinavia, has 37,000 students; and the other university is the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences at Uppsala, with 3000 students. For quite a few years, the two universities have had many joint research centers, particularly in the biology area, and also many educational programs which we actually run together. Recently, for example, we have initiated major efforts in bioinformatics and functional genomics together. The total annual budget for the two universities is about 5 billion Swedish Kronor, about $600 million U.S.
High technology industry at Uppsala is historically dominated by one company, Pharmacia, a pharmaceutical company, which was started in the 40's with about a hundred employees. Nurtured mainly by innovations from Uppsala University, the company grew in the 70's and 80's, so at the end of the 80's, there were about 2,000 people employed. Then globalization hit Uppsala. Pharmacia merged with Upjohn and started slowly to move from Uppsala. To start with, the headquarters moved to London and later to New Jersey. In 1996, the company announced that it was also starting to transfer part of the divisions in basic research, and about 200 people, or positions, were lost from Uppsala. About that time, I became Rector of Uppsala University, and Uppsala was really in a state of depression, which I attribute mainly to Pharmacia.
Since then, however, many interesting things have happened. Before the merger with Upjohn, Pharmacia was already divided up in smaller companies. Some left the parent company but stayed at Uppsala; Pharmacia Biotech merged with part of Amersham, forming Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, with headquarters at Uppsala; the Nutrition Division of the old Pharmacia was bought by the German company Fresenius, which also moved their headquarters to Uppsala. A number of new biotech companies have also been formed, some based on earlier unexploited product ideas of the former Pharmacia, and some of the new companies are based on innovations from faculty of the two universities. I think it has really been demonstrated, in this process, that people with competence in international marketing -- in production and so forth, which in the turmoil of Pharmacia starting to move became "available" -- are also really important ingredients for economic growth in a region.
In all, when things looked bad in 1996, there were about 2,500 people employed by Pharmacia. Today, there are 1000 more, i.e., 3,500, employed in biotechnology at Uppsala. Another sign of this rapid growth is that in the last five months, one billion Swedish Kronor have been invested in five of these new companies. This seems to indicate that in addition to innovation from the university system, the presence of a major international company, particularly if it is breaking up locally due to globalization, may be a catalyst in the formation of new spin-offs in the university environment. There are now more than 50 biotech companies around the universities, and several hundred high tech companies in total, some of them in the new fields of functional genomics and bioinformatics.
The new major project in terms of industry-university relations at Uppsala is what is called Campus Uppsala, where the two universities have joined into one campus that includes industry. So it's very much in the spirit of what Anders Flodström described earlier, i.e., the integration of industry into the campus. In order to make room for more spin-offs, a new science park has been formed. The Campus Uppsala program, I would like to stress, is a joint effort of the county, the city, the industries, and of the universities. We try to make use of the fact that Uppsala is a fairly small community, where we have close contacts and are able to make this integration happen. For instance, to go from the north of Uppsala University to the south part of the campus of the University of Agricultural Sciences takes about 15 minutes on a bike (I calibrated that myself).
Let me say a few words about the innovation system at Uppsala. By the innovation system I mean the whole process from invention or discovery in a research group to formation and consolidation of a company. The slide which illustrates this is rather complicated, partly because it illustrates a complicated process; the university is to the far left and industry and business to the far right. This is just to give you an indication of the many competencies that it takes, in our view, to make this whole process work well. There is a traditional scientist-to-scientist contact in forming ideas, and then there is a whole process (shown from left to the right) in which the business idea should be formalized and split off from the university. We have a special situation in Sweden -- I had hoped that Anders Flodström would have discussed this -- because, at present, the teachers own the IPR's, although this situation is most likely going to change. Anders Flodström is a proponent of the university taking over those rights from the teachers. I agree with him, but I think that we have to proceed slowly in order to give universities a chance!to develop skills for taking care of the patents, particularly the broker part, in a professional way. Carefully contructed model agreements also have to be worked out which guarantee, in a reasonable way, that the teachers get their share. I think it will take a few years for us to develop that system.
We also need to develop much more efficient project management methods for taking care of projects in the formation stage, in order to match the requirements of industry. We need venture capital on a larger scale than is available at present. However, it is interesting to note that in Sweden, the situation is now improving rapidly in this respect. An important point, touched upon by Emil Spjøtvoll, is entrepreneurship. In my view, this is the main difference between California and Sweden in this field. At Uppsala, we need to encourage entrepreneurship much more systematically . We have to showcase it in various educational programs, etc. We have also been importing new methods from California, like the Connect system established at San Diego. A few universities in Sweden, including Uppsala, have adopted this way of working.
In order to improve the efficiency of the network of Campus Uppsala and the innovation system, a portal is being set up with links to the websites of the various partners. In so doing, we hope to improve not only internal communication, but also external access to information about the program. Campus Uppsala is also actively recruiting outside companies. In this way, we hope to improve the contacts between university and industry, and to increase the rate at which new spin-off companies are formed.
© 2006 UC Regents
Last modified: 15 April 2006 | e-mail