Beams and Knowledge transfer team up for Innovation Day

The Beams department and the Knowledge transfer group met for a day to identify promising technologies to transfer to industry and academia

This month, CERN's Beams department and Knowledge transfer group hosted a BE-KT Innovation Day to identify ideas from the department with significant technology-transfer potential.

The morning was dedicated to the presentation and discussion of some ten innovative concepts proposed by experts from the Beams department, with a good balance between hardware and software technologies. Some ideas have been conceived in the context of longstanding projects; others are new developments or solutions that have recently generated the interest of external partners in industry or academia.

In the afternoon successful examples of ongoing projects and promising technologies in advanced phases of the technology transfer process were discussed.

The Innovation day was also an opportunity to provide updates on projects supported in previous years by the KT Fund – financial support made available by the Knowledge transfer group re-investing part of the revenues generated by the commercial exploitation of CERN’s technology portfolio.  

The department also presented a list of products licensed under CERN’s Open Hardware Licence, CERN OHL. The model has been successfully applied to seven electronic card designs commercialized by four companies after an initial triggering procurement action from CERN.

“The BE-KT Innovation day helped us not only to identify innovative technologies, but also to discuss what is the best way to disseminate them”, says Enrico Chesta, head of the Technology transfer and Intellectual property management section of the Knowledge transfer group. “Our impact-driven approach includes both open dissemination and protected dissemination strategies”, he says. “We choose which way to go by evaluating case by case what is the best way to maximize the positive impact on society and on the competitiveness of our industrial partners.”

The technologies presented, developed to generate, accelerate, diagnose and optimize beams in CERN’s accelerator complex, have potential for a variety of applications ranging from medical field (high gradient structures, power supplies and beam instrumentation for hadrontherapy, 4D tomography) to metrology (improvement of primary frequency standards, or measurement of ferrite material properties), aerospace (reduction of multipactoring risk on satellite equipment), energy consumption (high power RF loads for energy recovery), machine protection (high performance arc detection devices, or sensitive temperature mapping systems) and data acquisition (very flexible and fast control system codes or high precision computation methodologies ).

“We are always interested in learning about new opportunities," says Giovanni Anelli, head of the Knowledge transfer group. “The innovation day is a promising formula that could be extended to other departments to have a comprehensive overview of CERN’s technology transfer potentials and to match the needs of CERN’s inventors with the services provided by the Knowledge transfer group.”

Read more:

"BE-KT innovation day" – Paul Collier, Beams department head

Agenda and presentation slides