Approach

Nexor is set-up as a multidisciplinary consortium, in close collaboration with internal University Association partners. Moreover, we reach out to external companies and other partners in both, Flemish and European ecosystems for demand-driven basic and applied research.

Since 2014 Nexor has been providing promising results in technological research, patents granted and maturing spin-offs.

Nexor principal investigators are closely involved in Flanders Make, the Flemish Government’s Strategic Research Centre for the manufacturing industry. Flanders Make receives substantial funding from the Flemish government and an equal share of complementary funding from industrial sources. These funds are used to set up projects with a suite of privileged industry and university partners, including Nexor principal investigators. The industry network provided by Flanders Make allowed Nexor to realise a solid valorisation track over the last six years.

Besides Flanders Make, Nexor has collaborations with other strategic research initiatives within Flanders. Our links with this regional ecosystem enables us to transfer our research to industry more efficiently.

Nexor will co-create demonstrators to increase the exposure to industrial partners, together with the university colleges in the University Association. Moreover, we will integrate our demonstrators in the Antwerp Design Factory, a place to co-create/construct/exhibit and evaluate such demonstrators. To convince our partners, we explicitly aim for Prototype demonstrations in operational environments, thus TRL level 5—7.

In order to further increase our impact, we strive for European Framework Program funding, using the well-known Excellence Science and the Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness pillars. Additionally, Nexor targets the Innovative Europe pillar with the European Innovation Council funding and other initiatives especially geared to high TRL solutions (i.e. ITEA, ARTEMIS, ECSEL-JU), as well as EIT initiatives that will support our spin-off creation activities.

Nexor’s IP strategy is closely aligned to that of the university association. The patenting efforts are geared towards high quality patents with a good probability for acceptance and an outlook on economic return. Being a consortium with a large software research footprint, we will refine our internal software licensing and protection guidelines. Licenses are chosen depending on the intent and the audience of sharing software components. In addition, Nexor will develop a common branding policy for the solutions that are ready for take-up by industrial partners.