Abstract
In 2006 the Research Council of Norway established 14 Centres for Research-based Innovation, CRI, as a tool to stimulate the industry to further innovation (http://www.forskningsradet.no). The purpose is to build up and strengthen Norwegian research groups that work in close collaboration with partners from innovative industry and
innovative public enterprises, through longterm research. COIN – Concrete Innovation Centre is one of these 14 CRIs, and was the only one within materials and structures. COIN
ran as a CRI from 2007 to 2014.
The consortium partners of COIN represent the value chain of the business sector, and they represent leading multinational companies in the cement and building industry. The main measures to establishing links and integration between the partners, and to ensure competence transfer between the partners, are to have joint activities from project initiation and planning to report.
The research work was performed by the staff at SINTEF, the Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology (NTNU) including 16 PhDs, and by the industrial partners (in-kind). The technical activities in COIN are organized based on the social, environmental and industrial needs, as well as on the innovation strategies anchored in the corporate management of the industry partners. The work was organized in three focus areas:
1) Environmental friendly concrete structures
2) Economically competitive construction
3) Technical performance
COIN has become well known, also worldwide, and the display window for concrete research in Norway. Hence, this centralisation, and the fact that most of the results are public,
has made it considerably easier for the environment outside the COIN partners, public authorities included, to have access to concrete research results (e.g. via www.sintef.no/coin), and to see the importance of concrete. Also, the direct use of the results in the education at NTNU contributes to educate engineers with state of the art knowledge, to the benefit of the industry and society.