A conference on Science – Business Co-operation was held on 10 March 2017. It was organised by the Vision for Science and Technology Growth Foundation and attended by representatives of government institutions, the business community and academia.
‘The FMFIB is working to bring together public sector knowledge and skills and the requirements of the financial market in order to be able to offer viable financing instruments’, said Kamen Slavov, Head of the Financing Instruments Unit at Fund Manager of Financial Instruments in Bulgaria EAD (FMFIB). He presented the FMFIB activities and the financing instrument for equity/quasi-equity investments, Technology Transfer Fund (TTF), which the company offers. In his presentation, Kamen Slavov highlighted the key goals of the TTF: overcoming the gap between science and business; support for research and development; improving co-operation between enterprises and research organisations; deployment of innovations; acquisition, management and commercialisation of intellectual property. ‘The fund managers that will be selected to manage the Technology Transfer Fund must be experts and have an excellent knowledge of the environment, since one of their major roles, apart from allocating the resources, will be to create and develop a single ecosystem to unite science with business’, Kamen Slavov said.
The conference discussions focused on the opportunities to get financing for research on innovative products with business applications, other countries’ practices of managing intellectual property, patents and commercialisation procedures. Conference presenters included Mrs. Molly Morgan Jones from RAND Europe, Dr. Tobias Engert from the Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, Germany, Mrs Milena Damyanova, former Deputy Minister of Education and Science and Chair of Parliamentary Committee, Atanas Atanassov, Member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Mr Mladen Dzhalazov from Cupffee, Dipl. Eng. Plamen Dilkov, Vice President at Confindustria Bulgaria, Mr. David Hampson, Founder of the Vision for Science and Technology Growth Foundation, Prof. Kostadin Kostadinov, former Deputy Minister of Education and Science.
