Marie Louise Conradsen is Head of Open Science at Aarhus University. Since 2016, she has developed the university’s practice of using open science as a new model for industry collaboration - within several research areas. She now leads the university’s largest open science platform, the ODIN initiative. Marie Louise is also part of several international research projects that aims to map the anatomy of open collaborations. She has a strong interest in need- and research driven innovation, as she has approached the topic from many different angles from within academia – and also as chief consultant in the private sector. She holds a PhD from Copenhagen Business School and a MSc in Molecular Biology and The History of Science from Aarhus University.

Event: Building Consistency for Open Science in Europe: Rhetoric and Practice
Title: The Scientific Conversation Starter – How Openness Can Pave the Way for Innovation in Drug Discovery
Abstract: Can a research platform with a strict “no-IP” rule – and open sharing of all its results – accelerate drug discovery, engage industry in collective problem solving, and go hand in hand with commercialization downstream? Inspired by great open science initiatives like the Structural Genomics Consortium and the TOSI at McGill, Aarhus University has set out to answer this question with its own version of an open science platform for drug discovery (ODIN). A platform that is designed for “bottom up” ideation and crowdsourcing in a vast network of university researchers and life science companies. At the core of its activities, ODIN funds open and IP-free research projects that are co-created and carried out by industry and academia in close collaboration. In the presentation, Marie Louise Conradsen will talk about ODIN’s journey towards openness, its valorization strategy, the learnings so far – and why the initiative has chosen a slightly different approach to i.e. governance and ideation than its sources of inspiration.