I’m a Project Assistant at RMIT Europe, the European Hub of RMIT University (a global university of technology, design and enterprise located in Melbourne). RMIT Europe in Barcelona is the gateway for European research, industry, government and enterprise to innovation and talent in Australia and Asia. We work in many different EU-funded projects, and I am part of the Project Management team, mainly in two H2020 MSCA Projects related to innovation. I am involved in the OpenInnoTrain Project, which is what brought me to Vaasa. OpenInnoTrain is a global network of researchers and industry practitioners across Europe and Australia for promoting the translation of research between university-industry through cooperation and Open Innovation.

In OpenInnoTrain, we focus on Research Translation through secondments. Secondments are an exchange of research and innovation staff to share knowledge and ideas between university and industry. For my first secondment, I chose to visit the University of Vaasa because they are the leaders of our CleanTech Work Package.

The partners in Vaasa have been very much involved in the project since the beginning and it has been such a great opportunity to meet them in person and many other researchers working in sectors related to sustainability and renewable energies. Another important point for which I chose Vaasa was the possibility to attend the Energy Week event, and present OpenInnoTrain during the Researcher’s Exhibition of Energy, where not only could we share OpenInnoTrain’s experience with many researchers from the University of Vaasa, but also got to learn about many other very interesting energy-related projects.

I stayed in Vaasa for one month, and one of the purposes of my visit was to spread the word about the OpenInnoTrain project and the secondment opportunities that it offers to researchers and staff at the University of Vaasa working in FinTech, Industry 4.0, CleanTech and FoodTech. Thanks to three Q&A sessions that we organised, and the event at Energy Week, I have been able to disseminate the opportunities offered by the project quite broadly and, at the same time, increase my knowledge of CleanTech research in Vaasa and Finland. I have been very impressed by the Energy Cluster panorama in Vaasa and how compromised the region is with engaging in a more sustainable future.

Overall, it has been a very enriching experience, both personally and professionally and I can only recommend to our project partners to visit Vaasa if interested in CleanTech.

Èlia Vallejos
Project Assistant (Research)
RMIT Europe
Barcelona, Spain