Valorization addendum 193 Valorization addendum This chapter is intended to take a brief look upon the return of investment prospects for society from the knowledge gathered during this PhD‐trajectory. For clarification, first a few terms will be defined that are frequently used in this chapter: Valorization is the use, for socio‐economic purposes, of the results of research financed by public authorities. It represents society's direct and indirect return on the public sector's investment in research and development. More recently, the growing emphasis on open innovation has strengthened the cooperation between public research centers, universities and the business sector. Knowledge valorization refers to the utilization of scientific knowledge in practice. Examples include developing a product or a drug, or applying scientific knowledge to improve an existing system or process. The term knowledge valorization, in turn, is related to the term innovation. Innovation means converting new inventions to reality, in other words: applying inventions to create a product or process that indeed has a positive societal impact. Thus, in fact, an invention can only be considered an innovation if it is successfully applied and widely adopted in practice. History learns that many innovations were initiated by serendipity1 (valuable result by fortunate coincidence). One might argue that it would be worth thinking about how to increase the chance of indeed producing an innovation. Sheer luck itself cannot be forced, just like mankind cannot directly force a seed to sprout. But in both cases, optimizing the environmental preconditions increases the chance of success. An innovation eco‐system is a research environment that helps to identify the right problems to work on, systematically looks for solutions, and once these are found then encourages and facilitates to complete the road to an actual product. Hereafter the eco‐system in which this thesis was constructed will be described, then the societal and economical relevance of introducing optical techniques in surgery will be addressed, and finally a perspective on knowledge utilization will be given. Description of the eco‐system for the research conducted in this thesis This thesis focused on two optical techniques for application in surgery: near‐infrared fluorescence imaging (using exogenous contrasts) and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (based on endogenous contrasts). The focus of the research conducted on near‐infrared fluorescence laparoscopy was primarily guided by the researchers and medical
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