LUMEN Voices: ICF
In this series, we share short interviews to introduce you to the diverse partners contributing to our LUMEN vision. Each month, we’ll shine a spotlight on two of our partners—offering a glimpse into who they are, what they do, and what drives their work within LUMEN. In this edition, Andrew Dubber answered our questions.
Can you briefly introduce your organisation and its role within the LUMEN project?
The Industry Commons Foundation (ICF) is a non-profit research foundation focused on interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, data interoperability, skills development, and innovation methodologies. In LUMEN, ICF leads the Innovation Prototyping Labs (IPLs), fostering collaboration between researchers and industry across domains. ICF is also charged with establishing the EOSC Innovation Centre, ensuring long-term exploitation of LUMEN outcomes.
What is the most exciting aspect of your contribution to LUMEN, and how does it align with your organisation’s mission or values?
Our work in Innovation Prototyping Labs (IPLs) is particularly exciting, as it enables real-time interdisciplinary collaboration, reflecting ICF’s core mission of bridging research, industry, and creative sectors. We are also producing a podcast series called Inside EOSC that will represent the project and connect it to broader perspectives and ‘LUMEN-aries’ within the European Open Science Cloud ecosystem.
LUMEN is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you envision the project transforming the way research is
Through the IPLs, LUMEN fosters hands-on engagement across disciplines, breaking down traditional barriers between academic research and industry. We think of prototyping as ‘thinking out loud’ through making, and this co-creation breaks down silos and removes barriers that can be caused by discipline-specific jargon. This way, the project streamlines cross-domain knowledge transfer and creates new models for interdisciplinary discovery.
Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, what impact do you hope the LUMEN project will have on the broader research community and beyond?
By 2027, we expect the newly established EOSC Innovation Centre to be a permanent hub for collaborative research, knowledge transfer, and industry engagement, ensuring that the breakthroughs enabled by LUMEN continue to evolve and that the platform becomes central to the wider EOSC community. The methodologies developed in the IPLs will shape future interdisciplinary projects that leverage the LUMEN technologies, fostering sustainable innovation in Open Science.