University of Uppsala (UU)

Basic facts

Uppsala University (UU) applied for twelve SRAs and received seven. Furthermore, UU receives funding as co-applicant from three other funded SRAs.

In total, UU was allocated approximately 503 million Swedish Crowns by the government for the SRAs (2010–2014).

During 2014, the SRA funding corresponded to 4% of the basic funding for education and research given to UU from the government.

General comments

UU is an ‘omniversity’, covering a wide range of disciplines. UU said that it applied for SRAs in its areas of strength, some of which were confirmed in its internal quality evaluations in 2007 and 2011. The university actively decided not to apply in certain areas, where it felt it was not as strong. Of twelve applications led by UU, seven were successful. The University participates as a partner in three further SRAs, all led by Lund. Like other Swedish universities, UU has an innovations office and a holding company that can invest in patents and licensing. It also has an established tradition of ‘AIMdays’, so it is well equipped to ‘push’ for

commercialisation.

Strategic management and use of the SRA funding – Good

The university’s strategy dates from 2007 and is essentially to pursue all three university missions in an excellent manner. There is no overall thematic prioritization. UU has aimed to integrate its SRAs into the university from the start. Each has a ‘programme council’ chaired by a vice-rector or a dean of faculty. The link to senior university management is important both to embed the SRA in the university and to help overcome internal (typically organisational) obstacles to interdisciplinary. SRAs are implemented wholly within faculties – apart from the programme councils, so they won’t function separately from the normal university governance.

The SRAs are all quite different. Some have a lot of external money, others less. The university provides resources to all of them but in varying amounts and – as a result of the differences in other funding – therefore it provides different proportions of their total incomes. A lot of the money has been invested in new

appointments – both from Sweden and from abroad, since the key need is excellent personnel. However the flexibility with which SRA funding can be used is appreciated by the university. The university anticipates that if the SRA funding is prolonged and incorporated into UU’s institutional funding, it would continue to invest in the SRA areas although the balance among them would change. The SRAs are able to use UU’s comprehensive commercialisation infrastructure so this link with innovation is seen as secure.

University outcomes and excellence – Good

UU believes that the SRA experience has taught it to cooperate more effectively with other universities. It has highlighted the need for more research management training across the university – both in defining and managing one’s own research agenda. It also wants to make faculty more aware of people and activities within the university which have a potential or collaboration. The SRA money appears to have strengthened central management’s hand in developing the university but the SRAs have not been used to enter new areas but to reinforce existing strengths. The university believes that the link from the SRAs to education has been comparatively weak, suggesting a need to make education more flexible in future.

Added value of the SRA funding instrument – Good

UU is a traditional, full-spectrum university whose central management’s power and strategic capabilities are nonetheless in a process of expansion. SRA resources are largely devoted to the existing university strengths so that while they help pay for strengthening and renewal, they do not create new strategic possibilities. UU mirrors the national performance-based research funding system in allocating institutional funding for research

to individual faculties. While the amount of strategic funding the rector can control has increased recently, it is not clear that this is a direct result of the SRAs. Overall, UU has used SRA funding to strengthen its established positions but does not appear to have made strategic use of the money. So the value added is financial rather than strategic.

Summaries of the individual SRAs

SäkUU

Performance: Excellent/good Strategy: Good

Added value: Excellent

This SRA uses an interdisciplinary approach to disaster management and response. It brings together several strong disciplinary groups at UU but it has been difficult to manage across organisational boundaries. There are few role models globally that are truly interdisciplinary – perhaps only 4 or 5, including IRDR at UCL (with whom they are starting to cooperate), ARMIT at Melbourne and a group at Columbia University. There are also links with the insurance industry which for obvious reasons has a long tradition of trying to understand

disasters.

Hiring 30 PhDs has been a major use of resources and the SRA has established a graduate school in its area.

Very large numbers of people applied for these posts. Four graduates have found jobs quickly (3 of them in academia). The intention is to shift recruitment toward post-doctorates and KaU and FHS are starting Bachelors and Master’s courses in the area. UU is supporting the centre through ‘general’ measures such as its programme council and the willingness to invest in new people. UU plans to establish the SRA as an organisationally self-standing center jointly between the disciplinary domain of (i) Humanities and Social Sciences and (ii) Science and Technology – So far, the main influence on innovation has been through the SRAs engineering activities – other things will take a long time to filter through to the economy. The SRA appears to be doing good research and to have a strong strategy for its medium term development. A key uncertainty is the extent to which this value added will be counteracted by the institutional rigidities of the university.

PolregUU

Performance: Good/inadequate Strategy: Inadequate

Added value: Good

This is a small SRA, focusing on the politics and social development of post-Soviet Russia. This is clearly an area of great social interest and importance. However, it emphasises that it does not aim to serve the policy community directly nor to act as a ‘think tank’: it decides its own research topics internally. The centre claims to be unique in Sweden and one of only two similar centres in the Nordic area. Some 40% of the center’s funding comes from external, competitive projects. It highlighted its cooperation with three organisations in Russia and attracts upwards of a dozen visitors to work at the centre (6 of whom it can fund) at any one time.

UU provides support in the form of willingness to recruit but the centre cannot itself recruit PhD students – these have to be recruited by the relevant faculties. While being located at UU offers opportunities to work with up to 5 different university faculties, in practice working across faculty boundaries is difficult. UU’s

decentralised tradition gives the centre a lot of autonomy, but gets in the way of exploiting the intellectual breadth of the university. While the work of the centre appears to be of good quality, it does not appear to have been able to use the SRA resources significantly to strengthen its position within and outside of the university and to establish a stronger reputation and image.

MolbioUU

Performance: Excellent Strategy: Excellent Added value: Excellent

This SRA (Center for Genomic and Proteomic Medicine) has a long-term strategy to build up tissue samples and understand the molecular basis for human complex diseases and then to shift its focus to exploitation of the sample base through research. So far, about half the SRA money has been spent on biobanking and one third on recruiting young researchers. This activity builds of existing areas of strength in UU and is integrated into the SciLifeLab centre, providing synergies with other SRAs and research at UU and elsewhere. The centre sees itself as (together with the Stockholm site) a platform for drug discovery and has orientated its graduate school towards that activity. Other funding, for example from VINNOVA, is being used to strengthen this activity.

The university commercialisation infrastructure provides a strong platform from which to benefit from this activity. The SRA appears to be producing good work and has built a platform for continuing to do so, based on the existing strengths of the university. The area has benefited considerably from the SRA funding and made good use of the money to strengthen its own and the university’s position.

EvetUU

Performance: Good Strategy: Inadequate Added value: Inadequate

This is one of two science centres in Sweden, working on computational and data-centred challenges in e-science and building up infrastructure. It is a virtual centre federating UU, LU and UmU. Projects are initiated internally, with 10% of the SRA money set aside for collaboration within the consortium. However, the SRA accounts for only about 10% of the consortium’s total funding, so it has limited leverage over the overall activity. SRA funding has been used to strengthen the centre through recruitment. The centre seems to have limited cooperation with counterparts abroad and does not to cooperate much internally. Industrial interaction is also limited – chiefly to AIMdays, which is surprising given the importance of scientific computing to many of Sweden’s major companies. While the centre appears to be doing good quality work based on its previous experience and track record, it is hard to see that the SRA money has added much value to it or that the centre as a strategy for doing so.

CancerUU

Performance: Excellent/good Strategy: Excellent

Added value: Excellent

This activity builds not only on an area of research strength at UU but also on blood samples, tissue samples and clinical data from cancer patients in the participating counties, aiming to build up a comprehensive and longitudinal set of tissue samples. The intention is to use these to identify biomarkers for disease, the

effectiveness of treatment and understand resistance to treatment. UU has other activities such as competence centres active in the area, so the SRA money is connected with a bigger effort. So far the university has supported the centre through middle-level recruitment and funding and purchasing equipment. The link to education is largely through postgraduate short curses, rather than affecting the first-degree level. There is now a need to find a ‘home’ for the tissue samples, recruit more senior people and focus more fully on the research that the biobank enables. In practice, the biobank is partly distributed across different organisations in the County and an organisational solution is needed for managing this. The SRA cooperates with other centres at UU (eg SciLifeLab) and elsewhere. Strengthening the biobanking platform provides a strategic basis for research growth and an attractive area of research in which UU is likely to continue to play an important role.

VårdUU

Performance: Inadequate Strategy: Good

Added value: Good

This centre aims to develop ways to use the Internet to improve the quality and reduce the cost of psychosocial care of patients alongside medical treatment. A key success indicator is in the reduced amount of time patients spend in hospital and how it empowers them to play a more active role in their own care. The centre focuses on people with somatic illnesses who develop psychological stress. The SRA works with some 20 PhD students, mostly linked with the medical faculty. The research is said to be needs-driven, based on consultation with patients. The SRA federates activities across a number of departments and faculties rather than being

institutionally distinct. While the SRA aims to do medical-style control experiments, the quality of this kind of practical research aimed at professional practice can be hard to assess externally, such as through using bibliometrics, but the centre has yet to mark out a distinct international competitive position. Today, some 10 studies are using the Internet portal – three of which are internal to the SRA and seven external. The centre appears to have made good use of the SRA funding to strengthen its position but there is still further development needed to transform this into a leading centre.

EnergiUU

Performance: Excellent Strategy: Good

Added value: Good

This centre works on technological and economic aspects of energy production from renewable sources, integrating electricity from renewable sources into the distribution grid and electric propulsion and hybrid vehicles. UU leads this SRA, though KTH actually receives a larger share of the money. It federates the work of four universities, and sees itself in aspects of its work as comparable to the Karlsruhe Institute, CEA, Illinois and Munich. The SRA has added value by allowing them to recruit junior researchers and renew their part of the research community. They overlap with Chalmers but see this both as a source of healthy competition as well as an opportunity for collaboration. In practice, the group of Principal Investigators from the four

universities involved allocate the resources across the universities and activities, so the strategy is more bottom-up. The role of UU is to fund recruitment, to coordinate activities within the SRA and to build a common environment for energy research performed at the four partner universities. There has been a substantial – perhaps even too large – effort in Master’s-level education based on the work of the SRA. The SRA expects to continue after Year 5 and has established a strategy group to plan the continuation. While there appear to be issues of potential fragmentation, both among organisations and across fields, the SRA appears to have made good use of the opportunities provided by the money and to have clear ideas about how to continue.

APPENDIX 1: OVERVIEW OF SRA RESEARCH

LiU 1 Materialsscience VINNOVA

CTH 1

CTH 1 Production-technology VINNOVA

KTH 1

CTH 1 Transport-research VINNOVA

KTH 1