This year AUFF received 115 applications for the NOVA programme. 16 of them came from our department. We have 'won' one large NOVA grant and two NOVA small grants and half a small grant as partner in an application from Health. AUFF has also granted a mobility grant for a sabbatical leave.

AUFF NOVA

SmartER-FarmER? Management and organization of digital transformation in the agri-food sector
A grant of DKK 2,472,326 for Professor Lars Frederiksen (PI), Professor Andrea Carugati, Associate Professor Pernille Smith and Advisor Pernille Kallehave. The project group will cooperate with researchers at Department of Agroecology and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

About the project
Research in the natural and technical sciences reveals that the transformation towards a sustainable DK/EU agricultural production system could be driven by adoption of new digital technologies. Digital technologies are radically different from traditional farming technologies because they are typically more abstract and systemic by nature (e.g., increased opportunities in data, speed, etc.). The process of digitalization challenges the existing competence profile, organization of activities and perhaps the entire mindset among farmers, agricultural advisers, and other stakeholders in the agri-food system. Yet so far, several reports point out how it is indeed possible to improve the sustainability profile of farms while keeping productivity intact by adopting and appropriating digital technologies (e.g., precision and smart farming)6. What these reports uniformly highlight is that the challenges are less technical in character but rather are concerned with competences, culture, managerial approaches, and organizational structures and strategies. Hence, adoption and use of digital technologies connects more to the mindsets of people, their behaviours, and perceptions, than to the technologies per se. This project SmartER-FarmER aims to tackle these issues with a new interdisciplinary partnership between the research fields of agroecology, engineering, and management of technology.
The project identifies and explains: (1) the specific managerial and organizational drivers and barriers for the digital transformation of farming in order to (2) develop a set of managerial and policy recommendations to enable increased productivity with decreasing inputs while meeting or exceeding sustainability targets.

Resilient and safe hospital organizations during crisis – what can we learn from Covid-19?
A grant of DKK 500,000 (DKK 300,000 for MGMT) for Associate Professor Marianne Lisby (PI, Health) and at MGMT Professor Børge Obel and Assistant Professor Iben Duvald.

About the project
To be well prepared for a new pandemic or future crises affecting healthcare, it is crucial to evaluate  the efforts and learning embedded in handling the pandemic. The project's objective is to analyse the organizational steps at various levels in two acute health care systems (Denmark and Italy) and analyse the clinical consequences on flow and patient safety. Data from two health care systems will allow us to find general vs. specific effects. From a resilient point of view, we will focus on the first surge of Covid-19 as healthcare systems became more adaptive to upcoming challenges in the subsequent surges. The project is based on the hypothesis that patient safety was significantly affected by the hospitals' and regions’ ability to re- organize resources and decentralize decision-making; hence, a novel source of information on safe and resilient systems.
A successful outcome of the overall project will strengthen resilience in health care when facing new crisis in the future, regardless of their nature. Transforming the linkage between organizational efforts and clinical outcomes into a new organizational model in acute care can thus be a valuable contribution  to the EU program on pandemic preparedness and response.

Scaling up the market for green hydrogen
A grant of DKK 494,300 for Postdoc Jim Høeg Lozinski and Professor Chris Ellegaard.

About the project
The project aims at accelerating the market development for electrolysis by investigating how new marketing techniques can reduce customer uncertainty, when buying complex industrial solutions. B2B companies spend 70% of their marketing budget on in-person interaction, while customers only spend 17% of their customer journey with actual sales reps. To realign this inbalance, this project dives into new gamified and automated techniques, where the seller is not just pushing information but in stead becomes a facilitator and co-creator in the customer’s hydrogen project. Hopefully, this project will also contribute to MGMT’s reputation within the Danish PtX industry, as a competent and relevant research partner for projects related to creating markets for new green technologies.

text-to-x and the implications on human-AI co-creative expression
A grant of DKK 500;000 for professor Jacob Sherson.
The project will involve an interdisciplinary consortium of national and international researchers and spearheaded by Postdoc Janet Rafner at MGMT.

About the project
The field of computational creativity, in which algorithms autonomously generate human-level creative products, has been growing rapidly in recent years. This has led to the emergence of the field of computational co-creativity, which focuses on the collaboration between humans and AI in the creative process. Text-to-x (image, video, text etc.) technology has been at the forefront of this trend, with OpenAI's release of Dall-E in 2021 and GPT3 chat bot in 2022 being particularly notable examples. This technology has the potential to have a profound impact on the future of knowledge work, but as of yet has not been studied extensively in corporate settings. The goal of the project is to better understand the cognitive underpinnings of how text-to-x systems work and how they can be used to assess and foster creativity in the workplace and beyond.

AUFF Mobility

Measuring innovation - with a company or customer centric view? 
A grant of DKK 103,760 to support the sabbatical of Associate Professor Helle Alsted Søndergaard.

Helle has also received a grant for her sabbatical from Carlsberg. She will examine the relationship between measures of innovation together with colleagues at Universidad Carlos lll de Madrid, Spain from January to March 2023.