About
MSCA Sweden is a professional platform designed to support researchers in building structured impact, exploitation pathways, and strategic career positioning within European research and innovation frameworks. Activities are (i) individual, or (ii) collective with forum or workshop-based exchange enabling researchers to benefit from each other’s disciplinary expertize and career development experiences and perspectives.
(i) Individual competence and capacity building for research and career
(ii) Cohort-based peer exchange for career and network building
MSCA Sweden is an independent platform hosted by ICM Research Institute, Alminica AB, Sweden, providing non-academic placements, competence and capacity building (using courses, training and workshops), and individual career development support. The platform focuses on strengthening researchers’ capacity to translate research into societal and economic value, including impact strategy, exploitation pathways, value creation beyond academic publishing, and framing the relevance of research outcomes to European priorities.
Alminica AB focuses on transfer of knowledge from research and innovation, to create impact and exploitation from research and innovation towards business and sustainability, especially by values and assets using shared data and digitalization (green and digital transition, tokenization). More than 20 years of experience from EU-funded projects, ecosystems, incubators, entrepreneurial research, funding agencies, and investors. Particularly relevant to the MSCA Sweden platform are Alminica contributions to Innovation Radar, a European Commission initiative that identifies high-potential innovations and innovators within EU-funded research and innovation projects:
At the next level, with a focus on network building and long-term career development, is MSCA Europe – a European research community and network facilitating cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange and leadership capacity building across European research domains.
Where MSCA Sweden focuses on the individual researcher and near-term career development, MSCA Europe shifts perspective to the ecosystem level, supporting long-term positioning within the broader European research and innovation landscape.
The MSCA Sweden concept was created by Mikael Syväjärvi, founder of Alminica AB. The ICM Research Institute is the research and education division of Alminica AB. With 26 years in academia and a parallel career since 2005 as a serial entrepreneur in advanced materials, technology transfer, and start-ups, Mikael brings a rare combination of initiating novel research, and exploitation experience. He is active in training and courses bridging research and business, competence building for research and student careers, and knowledge sharing with the next generation of researchers and innovators.
Dr Mikael Syväjärvi has been researcher in academia 1995-2021, entrepreneurial since 2005, and active with Alminica AB since 2016. He has experience from EU projects in FP5, FP6, Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, including doctoral networks. The transfer of knowledge expertize has been further developed by his activity i EU FET Open project SiComb and EIC Pathfinder project rePowerSiC. He was active 2013-2018 with smart specialisation strategy (S3) by European Commission that is focussed on regional economic growth by the entrepreneurial discovery process. Alminica was procured by Region of Östergötland for supporting the S3 development in the focus area ”Advanced Materials”. The activity of the working group led to the creation of the cluster ”Innovative Materials Arena”. He is one of the pioneers in Sweden in graphene, and was in the board of Swedish National Innovation Programme for graphene 2014-2018 representing research and start-up area. He is co-founder of GraphenSiC AB (2011) that is Europe’s first company that has full business on epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide. He has busíness experience from co-founder in several start-ups and international technology transfer. He is active with value creation from shared data and digitalization to build digital assets and sustainability assets (tokenization) that is piloted in the special purpose vehicle GlobalSiC. He has an investment activity ”Jovaya Investment” that supports and invests in early stage start-ups from advanced materials research for emerging technologies. In 2021 he founded a private research institute ”ICM Research Institute” that is the research division of Alminica that also has hosting of researchers by visits or internships (including online mode).
Visit his LinkedIn page