1. The Short History
IPP/HUT one man contribution on WWW based information sharing
CERN’s VENUS-project on 3d product data visualization
LHC-project and need to distribute information during the design and engineering process
Initiation of the Tuovi-project, May 1995
as a Finnish acronym Tuovi stands for “Product Process Visualization”
Spin-off in 1998, VC-backed start in 2000

2. TuoviWDM - Global Access to Information
Tuovi stands for “Product Process Visualization”, used 32 man-years
Provides unified access to engineering, administrative, library, production, maintenance databases
Distributed project management support
Joint R&D with Nokia, Valmet, Pöyry, ABB, Finnyards, Wärtsilä NSD
Spin-off and VC-backed start in 2000

3. Manpower used altogether 39 people involved during 1995-99
22 short-term students
of which 80% went in industry
overall effort ~32 man-years
20% of funding from industry
several industrial pilots

4. Tuovi software for physics data management
Goal: Investigate use of Tuovi technology in managing various types of physics data
Present the physicist a unified, fully configurable interface to all detector / technical / physics data
Primary collaborator the CMS experiment, in particular the Crystal project
collaboration agreement for 3 phase study

5. © Copyright agreement in 1996
CERN was granted a non-exclusive, permanent and irrevocable license to use the TuoviWDM free of charge, CERN has no liabilities whatsoever
A modest measure of support was promised during the period while TuoviWDM was under development
Ownership, rights of use and intellectual property rights of the software remained at HIP
The question of serious customer support remained open and still is
Some complication on disseminating the implication of the agreement within CERN
CERN top-level support was essential

6. Lessons learned
Unesco recommendation that university faculty members own their own inventions, CERN has not drawn direct policies on this
Many scientists and administrators in science organizations are not supportive and often even adverse towards industrial applications and the business world
Free flow of technology to existing industry and to emerging spin-off companies is a most important source of new high technology business in the countries participating in the science facilities
Focus on intangible benefits

7. The volume….
In Europe, worth some 20 b$ of public money is annually spent on purchasing technology-oriented equipment from industry of which 2b$ are for inter-governmental, scientific research projects (EUR, Second European Report on S&T Indicators EUR EN, EC DGXII, Brussels, 1997.).