Two leading academic institutions in the country have entered into a partnership to leverage each other’s capacity to enhance their contribution towards making Qatar a world-class hub of research and innovation.
Qatar University (QU) and Qatar Foundation (QF) yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen their existing strategic and research collaboration.
“Collaboration between institutions and across sectors, allowing knowledge and expertise to be shared and resources to be maximised, is essential to advancing Qatar’s research and development enterprise, defining strategic direction, and creating tangible impact in the form of commercially-available innovations,” said Dr Hamad Al Ibrahim, Qatar Foundation Research and Development (QF R&D) Executive Vice President.
“Through this agreement, the methods and tools developed by QF R&D to support strategic planning and comprehensive research analysis will have wider application, for the benefit of Qatar, and potential new collaborations and avenues of research opportunity will open up,” he said.
QF will collaborate with QU in the evaluation, protection, maintenance, commercialisation and/or licensing of QU inventions, and provide periodic reports of all changes and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). QF will also collaborate with QU in its strategic planning in research tools and methods developed by QF R&D such as pillar diagnostics, KPIs, portfolio analysis, and landscape and hotspot analysis.
Both the institutions are collaborating on creating a National Knowledge Management Information System. Hence, QU will provide QF with access to its database of research activities funded through direct funding, an overview of potential national and international collaborations, and also research white spaces.
QU will also contribute to the analysis and development of policy frameworks and regulations.
The terms of the agreement also include collaboration on co-recruiting professional staff in the areas of intellectual property strategy and management, data analysis, and research and development policy development.
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