Voices on the upcoming Research and Innovation Bill 2024: BIRGITTA BERGVALL-KÅREBORN “Higher education institutions need a bigger budget for a long-term perspective”

She is a professor of informatics and has conducted research on digital platforms and crowdsourcing. Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn has worked in academia her entire career – today she is Vice-Chancellor at Luleå University of Technology.

What can we expect from the bill?

– The focus of this bill is excellence, innovation and internationalization. These are three areas that are of the utmost importance for Sweden. And I really hope that the government prioritizes more long-term and stable financing since it takes time to build excellent research environments.

– This has been difficult so far as almost all of our government funding is used to co-finance research projects decided by other authorities and organizations. If the basic grant increases in relation to external funding, we as an university can develop research areas that suit our unique strengths, and make long-term priorities. We also have a greater opportunity to support our external partners with needs-driven research in areas that are important to them, but where it is difficult to obtain external funding.

The government communicates a lot about excellence, but not as much about efforts to reach out with research in society. What are your thoughts on that?

– We must ensure that all research is excellent; that must be the ambition regardless of the field or type of research. We must have both basic and applied research, and I have high hopes that we will see initiatives across the whole spectrum. And we must, of course, ensure that research reaches out into society. I expect the government to prioritize this in the upcoming bill.

What is needed for the development of innovation and entrepreneurship in Sweden?

– We have our innovation offices and our holding companies. But I think we need a national strategy so that the regional environments can be strengthened and support each other. Another challenge is that there is still a lack of early-stage capital. That is a challenge.

– Secondly, Sweden needs to start marketing the teacher exemption to a greater extent than we do today. Researchers around the world need to know that Sweden is one of two countries in the world where researchers who want to combine research, innovation and entrepreneurship can do so. The teacher exemption gives researchers and teachers at Swedish higher education institutions the right to the research results they produce in their job, which creates a unique opportunity for researchers and teachers to commercialize their research results. The teacher exemption could be of interest to a large number of entrepreneurial researchers worldwide – if only they knew about it.

Contact birgitta.bergvall-kareborn@ltu.se

Read more voices on the Research and Innovation Bill:
Eugenia Perez Vico, innovation researcher and expert on research policy at Halmstad University

Mats Benner, professor of research policy at Lund University

Read interview with Minister of Education Johan Pehrson