Dear Minister Morten Östergaard, dear Dr. Rudolf Strohmeyer, distinguished speakers, colleagues and participants, it's a great honor for me to welcome you all to Aarhus and to this conference on Industrial Technologies 2012.

Aarhus University is proud to host such an important event to further our common understanding of new materials, nano and production technologies. We'll do all our utmost to follow the path laid out by the first conference in this series of conferences which took place in Brussels 2010.

Industrial Technologies 2012 has approximately 850 participants and more than 70 international speakers who will provide inputs across 4 plenary sessions, 18 breakout sessions and 16 workshops.

In addition, the conference features more than 85 exhibitors that showcase cutting-edge products and technologies. So indeed it's up to all of you, the contributors and participants to make it a success.

I warmly welcome all of you. We look forward to three inspiring days with an underlying focus on improving the environment for innovation in Europe and thereby contributing to competitiveness and growth of the European economies. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers, the

partner companies, the media partners and everyone involved in organizing this event. It's indeed a very inspiring program we have in front of us, so please enjoy it. This event is hosted under the auspices of the Danish EU presidency and is supported by the European Commission.

We acknowledge this support. Without it we could not have succeeded. The political support is clear evidence that innovation is on top of the agenda, not only in Denmark but all over Europe. During the Danish EU presidency our government has focused on the preparation of the Horizon 2020 program.

This program has the potential of becoming one of the most ambitious collective investments in research and innovation ever seen. The three guiding principles are excellent sciences, industrial leadership and societal changes.

In April, here at Aarhus University, we hosted an official EU presidency conference on excellence in research. The key outcome of this conference was the Aarhus Declaration on Excellence in Research.

This document was formulated and reviewed through consultation across Europe and is available at the stand here in front of the lecture hall. The core message is the following.

Europe needs to strengthen its science base with excellence as the guiding principle. I hope that this conference at the end on Thursday in its declaration will spell out the commitments and prerequisites for industrial leadership.

This will be a complement to the other Aarhus Declaration and will help to form the foundation for the coming Horizon 2020 program. And the reasons are straightforward. Europe and the world at large face a number of really great societal challenges.

More than ever, decision makers are turning to research for answers in areas like increasing population, resource scarcity, epidemics and pandemics, instability, political and economic, safety and, of course, climate change.

To face all these challenges, we need to work on interdisciplinary solutions and we need to engage industry as well as the knowledge base. We need and we see massive investments in research, education and innovation in other regions.

In East Asia, China, Korea, Japan, South Asia, India, in Latin America, Brazil, Colombia and Chile, just to name a couple. In addition to the traditional transatlantic competition for knowledge and innovation.

In fact, there is a highly competitive and global market out there characterized by increasing mobility of goods, knowledge and people. Attracting and nurturing the best brains and the most talented students is indeed a top priority for leading universities, businesses and industries all over the world.

And it is essential for Europe to be a front runner in order to remain among the most attractive and competitive areas for research and innovation in what indeed is increasingly a global knowledge based economy. This can only be done by strengthening the European research innovation and higher education base with excellence as a guiding principle.

To deliver on this ambition calls for freedom and trust, freedom to pursue the unexpected and trust in the individual researcher that he or she is able to identify the right course of action.

The real and major breakthroughs can never be planned or foreseen. Time and again we see that and what starts out as an unconventional idea or even something a researcher just stumbled upon, turns out to provide the insight leading to new technologies and innovation, innovative solutions.

Major breakthroughs require a long-term perspective. When you visit the exhibition at this conference you will see that the technologies presented stand on the shoulders of scientific results achieved several years or in some instances several decades ago.

All this trust, freedom and long-term perspectives call for political leadership and the courage to allocate funding without knowing the exact outcome. Only by providing state-of-the-art infrastructure and by allowing the best

researchers to pursue the unexpected can we in Europe attract the best researchers. The path towards competitiveness and growth also puts obligations on European universities and research communities. We need to adjust our organizational structures to allow for creativity and innovation to flourish.

Freedom, trust and long-term perspectives are needed but this is not enough. Today's challenges require a different response as the challenges at hand are much more complex in character and it calls for interdisciplinary approaches.

Indeed it also calls for public-private partnerships and you will see a number of very good examples on that during this conference. At Aarhus University we have just made the largest transformation in history of the university in order to be better prepared to combine deep scientific insight and state-of-the

-art research with interdisciplinary collaboration in close and flexible interaction with the world around us. We are achieving greater coherence with fewer units and fewer internal barriers in the academic as well as in the administrative organization.

And we have launched a number of initiatives to support interdisciplinary, talent development, entrepreneurship and collaboration with industry and business partners. For example recently we have set up separate funding initiatives from which we on

a competitive basis have supported the most creative ideas our research staff had developed. I focus so far on the role of government and universities but we also need a stronger cooperation with the innovation community at large. We all play our part of the innovation system. Strong private-public cooperation is a key to success.

Alone we can do something but together we can do much more. The strong industrial participation at this conference is a promising signal that we are on the right track.

I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize that by focusing on the real scientific breakthroughs we also pave the way for innovative industrial technologies. There is no contradiction between basic research, applied research and innovation as I will demonstrate with a small example. The Danish National Research Foundation finances the most excellent basic research you will find in this country.

The number of patents arising from this cutting edge basic research is very high. In fact last year 16% of all patent applications from public institutions in Denmark were from these centers of excellence, which is about 10 times their share of total funding.

Of course the number of patents can never and should never be a measure of the success rate but it demonstrates that funding basic research leads to results on which new and innovative industrial technologies can build.

Likewise the European Research Council has been highly successful as their grants have far-reaching impact in a number of important areas. ERC finance researchers are strongly represented among the winners of prestigious research prizes and in 2011 results

were published every week from at least one ERC finance research project in either nature or science. Moreover several ERC projects have led to fundamental discoveries. For example the Russian professor of physics and astronomy Konstantin

Novoselov at University of Manchester who was one of the first winners of an ERC grant in 2007 and who three years later won the Nobel Prize in physics for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.

Allow me to highlight a successful example from our surroundings here which fully demonstrates what we have just talked about. A few weeks ago a local all-space biotech company Axon Pharma founded by two

of our professors was sold to an American company Abbott for 110 million US dollars. The product they have developed is named, a very sexy name, AP214, has the potential to be an effective antidote to prevent acute kidney injury.

For almost 10 years the two professors have focused on developing novel drug candidates and on bridging these to the stage, bringing these to the stage of clinical proof of concept for subsequent partnering with more established companies.

Leading international research groups became involved and private investors had a strong belief in the project and provided the capital needed to proceed. It's important to note that the driving force was the curiosity of the two professors and the fact that they had the freedom to stay focused and manage their research time.

Without that there would have been no new product, AP214. But they also had access to state-of-the-art infrastructure and access to seed capital when necessary pre-conditions were not hampering their productivity.

But the driving force was scientific curiosity and was initially supported by a center of excellence grant from the Danish National Research Foundation.

Ladies and gentlemen, strengthening Europe's industrial technologies requires collaboration and a determined effort on part of many different players, industry, governments and the research community. Europe's success in this endeavor hinges on the ability to do this with excellence in research and in innovation as a guiding principle.

I'm sure the discussions during this conference will take us further down the road of European growth of improved competitiveness. I hope you will enjoy your days in Aarhus and that you will take full

advantage of the opportunities to network, discuss and share experiences with colleagues from all over Europe. I must also urge you to visit Aarhus University's campus. It's in fact one of the prettiest and most well-functioning campuses in the world and it's only 10 minutes from here. It's right in the heart of the city of Aarhus and never hesitate to ask one of my colleagues and one of our many students to help or for advice.

When you get home, drop us an email if you think we can be of any help in your endeavors. Once again, welcome to all of you to Aarhus and to the Conference on Industrial Technologies.