#32 VITO's way up - Building a research organisation on EU funds w. guest Ludo Diels
All research organisations struggle with how to attract enough resources to develop the research activities that is strategically important. Using EU funds is one way to go, but can be trouble-some. VITO is one of the strongest private research organisations in Europe and they are continously at ranking in the top of research organisations collecting most EU R&D funding. I had a talk with Ludo Diels who has a long career in different research leading positions in VITO. He is now a professor emeritus and for VITO he is involved in Processes4Planet as Chairman of the Advisory and Programming Group. We digged into the Belgian-Flemish private research organization VITO and how they have used EU funding as a key tool to build up the organization over the years from the early framework programme in the 1980's and 1990's and to now with a coherent strong funding strategy that is vital for their work in the different research departments and business units. This conversation sheds light on the challenges that research organisations have in keeping up the flow of money to fund their research activities and how to work internally as well as externally to succeed with this. This episode has very strong advice and insights from one of the most successful research organisations on Europe on how to work with EU funding as a research organisation.