How RTOs Turn Research into Impact – The Spanish Model
With Patricia Castillo, Director of Impact at Eurecat
Check out the episode website
In this episode, I’m joined by Patricia Castillo, Director of Impact at Eurecat, to explore what research and technology organisations actually do and why they occupy such an important place in Europe’s innovation ecosystem. RTOs sit between universities, companies, start-ups and public authorities. Their purpose is to help move technologies beyond promising laboratory results and towards something that can be manufactured, scaled, financed and used by companies in the real world. Patricia explains why that process is not a simple linear transfer from science to market, but a continuous interaction between researchers, industry and society.
We also examine the distinctive Spanish model, where RTOs are private non-profit organisations with limited baseline support and must combine competitive public funding with industry contracts and services. That creates a difficult but productive tension: responding to companies’ needs today while investing in the knowledge, people and infrastructure that may be required ten years from now. We discuss impact management, responsible technology development, long-term research capacity, tacit knowledge, falling success rates and why generic AI-written sections on impact, gender and dissemination are becoming increasingly easy for evaluators to recognise.
Time codes:
01:39 Guest introduction and fly in
05:15 Understanding the RTO Model
16:06 The Spanish Context
26:41 Living with the Challenge
49:09 The Book - Capturing Knowledge Before It Disappears
01:01:17 Reflections and advice
01:03:17 The toughest challenge
