All quiet on the West Front

So things been quiet lately here, too quiet. As is usually the case no news are good news. Indeed, I have been way too busy trying to joggle new strategic initiatives, some ambitious client projects, hiring new people and getting a research paper out the door. What is always interesting when hiring new people is that you get a glimpse at what is going on in other areas of the industry. I was also fortunate enough to participate in Innogate, a seminar on serious games and talking to a master student who was trying to find out what the prospects were for the Danish games industry.

All in all it leads to a lot of thinking of what one can do – so many options so little time. The old talk about partnership, sharing technology, networking etc. keeps coming up in these contexts. However, even if I often try to seek out these things out it seems it often don’t really materialize. I find that its amazingly hard to find these win-win partnerships, research projects or alliances that really work. We have had our share of attempts, and will continue.

One thing that I am particular frustrated with is that we are involved in numerous research projects, and even if it creates some value it never really gets to the point where I want it to. Maybe I am just unrealistic but I think a lot of the time it relates to the fact that the university world defines the research projects more than the commercial partner. Even if for example EU are very much into the whole ‘make it a commercial viable and interesting project’ it seems it never really materialize in these projects. It becomes too much lip-serving to research agendas, research communities and strange deliverables promised in a early application stage with imperfect knowledge (+ all the other general stuff arising from running long term projects with many partners with ill defined roles).

So I am really thinking about how we can get more value out of these projects, and help drive the area forward. I think that one of the tricks are to be more realistic, down-to-earth and humble. I have read more than a few research applications (especially for EU) that just didn’t make any sense but was a ‘ton’ of long words with unclear meaning to everyone (perhaps except the three researchers that were experts in the area). From now on my first question will be what is the exit-strategy for a research project.