Collaboration Achievement

This award is open to collaboration partners either between labs working in academia or industry or cross collaborations between commercial and academic labs. This includes labs working in all disciplines across the sciences.

Entry is by a 5 A4 page submission; the judges will be looking for clear information backed up by facts that pays particular attention to the criteria listed below.

• Please outline the size and nature of the collaborating partner’s organisations. This includes the turnover or level of funding; level of job creation/ employment/ training or number of students hosted.

• Originality of the research/ work carried out in the lab: How does your work compare to everybody else's? How competitive is your product, service or research?

• What is the scientific depth of the project and level of innovation? What is the degree of innovation demonstrated specifically by the collaborative work and does it have commercial potential?

• Please provide evidence of specific outcomes of the collaboration. How many publications have been produced both publicly and privately, products brought to market, invention disclosures, patents, licenses and spin outs have occurred. How attractive is the collaboration? How much joint funding did they achieve? This can include investment from R & D entities, governmental support or funding achieved by outside agencies e.g. EU or commercial partners

• What are the contributions made by the various team members? What is the scale of effort in terms of manpower, time and materials? What is the nature of the collaboration and activity undertaken across the partners? Are the partners located at sites in Ireland? Is there an International component to the collaboration? Is there potential for the development of long term partnerships.

• Have there been any specific training objectives achieved by the collaboration? Please provide evidence of the number of trainees moving into industry or academia.

• What is the potential impact of the technology/ product/process to the sciences? Are there commercial market applications and implementation. What are the technical, societal, environmental or other benefits arising from the work?