Following the signing of a new contract, which extends the collaboration between KMi and Springer Nature (SN) to December 2025, KMi researchers Enrico Motta, Francesco Osborne and Angelo Salatino spent two days at the SN campus in London. The purpose of the workshop was to gather all the relevant stakeholders from the various SN scientific sectors around the world to touch base on the state of the collaboration and to plan the activities associated with the new contract. Another important motivation for the event was to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the partnership, which formally started in 2014. This is indeed a magnificent achievement and a rare one in the context of industry-academia collaborations.
The workshop started with a presentation by Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Alex Birukou (SN), which told the story of how the partnership was conceived over 10 years ago, and how it has evolved over the years. In particular, there was strong consensus that a key factor underlying the success of the collaboration was the ability of the two teams to negotiate shared goals collaboratively and dynamically over the years, moving away from reductive and prone to failure collaboration models where academics are simply expected to address problems specified by the commercial partner.
The workshop ended with a collaborative design task, where ideas for future activities were generated and discussed by the participants.
In sum, even after 10 years, the collaboration between KMi and Springer Nature is going from strength to strength and we very much look forward to future developments.
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