AIMday for universities

Knowledge exchange matters. Make it work. For real.

AIMday creates value for everyone. Academic researchers gain a better understanding of real needs and challenges in external organisations and companies and how they could contribute with their knowledge and problem-solving skills. Organisations in their turn see your university as a valuable and accessible resource for their development and success. Through AIMday, your university can create a meeting place between these worlds but also help drive new opportunities for mutual exchange and learning.

AIMday gives you a structured and well-tested approach to starting collaborations. AIMday offers a method and an underlying tool that brings researchers and external organisations together around themes, based on real needs and challenges. We believe in networking and creating opportunities to easily meet to initiate conversations, exchange thoughts and ideas, and start collaborations.

By introducing AIMday to Monash and Australia, we’ve created a new gateway for meaningful University–Industry collaboration.

Andrea Collevecchio, Professor School of Mathematics, Monash University, Australia

One challenge. One hour. Endless possibilities.

What makes AIMday a special meeting place is the format of the meeting itself. Well-defined challenges, both strategic and operational, from external organisations and companies form the basis of the meeting agenda. Your university then matches these challenges with researchers who have expertise in the field. The result is a day filled with workshops, where each challenge is discussed for an hour in small groups consisting of both representatives from the organisations and academic researchers.

The goal of an AIMday event is an effective and engaged exchange of knowledge and ideas with a focus on deepening the understanding of each challenge and discussing possible collaborations. AIMday can help create not only an experience and learning in the moment but also a starting point for continued contact and further collaboration.

The university decides the theme. The organisations set the challenges.

AIMday is truly multi-disciplinary. As a university, you have the opportunity to approach an industry or sector whose need to deal with specific challenges mirrors your academic strengths. You select the themes, which are the focus of all AIMday meetings. But industry formulates the questions, which address real-world challenges. Life science and materials technologies are fields where AIMday has met with immediate success. Yet the concept need not be restricted to science and technology, nor to commercial companies. It is equally effective for national or local government organisations, service organisations or non-profit associations. Simply put, there is ample opportunity to get your humanities or social science faculties involved as well.

Promote outstanding scientific merit

By organising an AIMday, your university not only has the opportunity to promote excellent research and education, it also provides you with the opportunity to specifically approach an industry or sector that you wish to collaborate with. Furthermore, AIMday helps you demonstrate how your university can take real-world challenges and explore the many possible routes to potential innovative solutions.

Just how successful is AIMday?

That the people who participate in an AIMday have a positive experience of their participation is fundamental to continued success. That is why we conduct a simple evaluation in connection with each event. These evaluations show that the participants in general, regardless of whether they are academic researchers or representatives from external organisations, perceive their participation very positively.

We also know that AIMday serves as a springboard for further exploring and initiating collaborative projects later on. Examples of different forms of collaboration that AIMday has laid the foundation for are joint research projects and applications for funding; company and study visits; mobility projects; and student projects.

One of our good examples is Platinea, a platform that aims to improve the availability and use of existing antibiotics through research and innovation. Platinea started at an AIMday event as a challenge from a company and has since grown into a large collaboration platform that has received external funding from the Swedish innovation agency VINNOVA. Today, Platinea includes over twenty actors from academia, government, industry and healthcare.
Read more about Platinea

Average survey responses

94%

83%

90%

Upcoming events

Materials

26 March 2026

Uppsala, Sweden

Uppsala University

Organisations in Transition

19 May 2026

Umeå, Sweden

Umeå University

Climate

17 June 2026

Leeds, United Kingdom

University of Leeds