SINTEFs historie

The project is being carried out by the BI Norwegian Business School as the responsible party in collaboration with NORCE and will be carried out from December 2021 until July 1st, 2024. The work will result in a book for SINTEF's 75th anniversary in 2025.

The authors are historians Håvard Brede Aven (Western Norway University of Applied Sciences), Pål Nygaard (BI Norwegian Business School, project leader), and Knut Grove (NORCE). The project is followed by a book committee made up of historians from Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology (NTNU), BI Norwegian Business School, and NIFU, as well as employees from SINTEF.

SINTEF was established in 1950 by NTH, which today is part of NTNU. Since the 1970s, the research institute has grown to become one of Europe's largest independent research institutes.

As a mainly technical-scientific research institute, SINTEF's contributions are significant, including Ugelstad spheres, Autokon, Dynamic positioning, multiphase laboratory, and carbon capture.

Through SINTEF's history, the authors have good access to study and understand how business, institutions, and society are built on organized research activity around various problems the community wants to solve, which then provides opportunities for growth and welfare.

The project takes a user perspective: What has SINTEF's research been used for? Previous representations have described much of the institution's and academic communities' development. The goal here is to analyze and bring out more overarching features to show how SINTEF has responded to its social mission in different parts of its history.

The book project describes the rise and development based on three central relationships that have characterized SINTEF as an institution:

• to clients or users of the organization,
• to NTH/NTNU/UiO and the academic communities there,
• to research policy.

When the use and users of SINTEF's work are studied, these collaborative relationships are central. The relationships are again linked to society and the political, technological, and economic processes within which SINTEF's research acted and tried to respond to.

The approach is chosen to explore how the most well-known and impressive projects and products of SINTEF have been designed in collaboration (and potentially conflict) with different types of users, but also how SINTEF has worked with less spectacular but no less important things like standards and certification schemes.

The presentation is chronological, where the 75-year history is divided into four periods with thematic chapters to bring out the self-dynamics and logic of each period, based on the collaboration relationships. The period division with main headings is:

• 1950-1970: From strawberry picker to major industrial projects
• 1970-1987: From academic expansion to petroleum-based growth
• 1987-2004: Through crises to new growth
• 2004-2025: Europe and the green shift.