The Doctoral Research & Innovation Exchange brings together researchers, practitioner doctoral candidates, doctoral faculty, entrepreneurs, business leaders, professionals and other stakeholders for conversations around questions at the intersection of research, innovation and practice.
Why this session?
There is potentially a transferable process behind doctoral research: how a researcher moves from a question, through framing and sense-making, to examining assumptions, gathering and interpreting evidence, and developing conclusions.
Startups, researchers and those supporting innovation often approach problems differently. They use different terminology, work with different assumptions and have different expectations about what constitutes useful evidence or a good outcome.
The Festa 2026 Startup Ecosystem Insight Lab highlighted how these differences can make it difficult to connect founders with research, expertise and potential collaborators.
This session therefore explores what founders and those supporting innovators can learn from the way doctoral researchers approach complex problems—and what academia can learn from the way founders approach uncertainty and action.
What will we actually do?
Participants will work through a series of practical activities using a common challenges to examine how different communities frame problems, identify assumptions, use evidence and translate insights into action.
| Activity |
What we explore |
| Sense-making |
How do different communities understand and frame the same problem? |
| Translation Mapping |
What terminology, assumptions and expectations need to be translated between them? |
| Knowledge Building |
What can founders, researchers and innovation practitioners learn from each other’s approaches? |
| Critical Inquiry |
Which assumptions deserve to be challenged, and what evidence could help? |
Session Takeaways
For founders and startups
- Explore a structured way of looking at a business challenge, test your assumptions from different perspectives, and identify questions or evidence you may not have considered.
For people supporting innovators
- Better understand how founders and researchers approach problems, identify where translation is needed, and explore how you can help connect the two.
For researchers and doctoral candidates
- Consider how elements of your research approach can be communicated and applied in business settings, while learning from the practical and action-oriented perspective of founders.
Want to take the conversation further?
Join us the following day, 11 September, for the Doctoral-Thinking Test Drive Workshop, where some of the ideas and approaches explored in this session will be taken into a practical setting, allowing participants to work on concrete challenges.
Agenda
16.00 Welcome & Scene Setting
16.15 – 16.45 Ice Breaker Activity: Are there patterns on how professions approach challenges?
16.45 – 17.30 How can ideas developed in one context be translated so they become meaningful and useful in another?
17.30 – 17.45 Coffee break
17.45 – 18.30 Different journey same thinking. Or same journey and different thinking?
18.30 – 19.00 Closing Question: Who translates between the different worlds?
19:00 – 20.00 Networking & closing
Agenda
16.00 Welcome & Scene Setting
16.15 – 16.45 Ice Breaker: Are there patterns on how professions approach challenges?
Sense-making activity: Introduction and reflection on a process framework that illustrates how different professions approach challenges in the work environment looking at potential patterns across these profession. Individual reflections followed by a group discussion.
16.45 – 17.30 How can ideas developed in one context be translated so they become meaningful and useful in another?
Different professional communities often approach comparable challenges through different language, different experiences and different frames of reference. Understanding those differences provides a ground for building stronger connections between research and practice.
Translation mapping activity: Write a number of contexts that you would see on a post it. One context per post it.
17.30 – 17.45 Coffee break
17.45 – 18.30 Different journey same thinking. Or same journey and different thinking?
What would change if founders would think like researchers, or if researchers start thinking like founders?
Knowledge building activity: What are the desirable parts of the respective other journey that should be trained?
18.30 – 19.00 Closing Question: Who translates between the different worlds?
Translation rarely happens automatically. Researchers are trained to communicate with researchers. Founders naturally communicate with other founders. Executives develop the language of leadership, strategy and organisational performance. Each community develops its own vocabulary, assumptions and ways of framing problems. That diversity is valuable. At the same time, it can make meaningful collaboration more difficult than it needs to be.
Critical inquiry activity: Who are the transfer agents? Group discussion
19:00 – 20.00 Networking & closing
Event Category
Doctoral Faculty Development, Doctoral Study Programmes, Hubs, Malta Hub
Intake Open Date
17 August 2026
Registration Deadline
14 October 2026
Event Start Date
15 October 2026
Event Time
4:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Dr. Ana Faria
Ana joined the DoctorateHub at the very early stage back in 2017 and is heading the DoctorateHub office.
Ana holds a PhD from the Engineering and Innovation Department at the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology, The Open University UK, that has been awarded for her thesis on “The role of behaviour in the transition to more energy efficient use at home”. Her research combined positivist and constructivist paradigms, so to allow for both: statistically analyse the data, whilst also allowing for an exploration of the complex set of variables that influence human behaviour. With this her research used a mixed, multi-method research methodology, using both quantitative and qualitative research procedures. Quantitative research aimed to gain insight and identify issues for the subsequent qualitative phases of the empirical work, while the qualitative research aims to explore attitudes, behaviour and experiences through such methods as interviews or focus groups.
Dr. Andreas Meiszner
Since 2012, I have tutored, mentored and coached beyond 500 professional doctoral students (mid to seniors, aged 35 to 70) both with the University of Liverpool Management School’s Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) program (UK), and since 2016 also with DoctorateHub. This allowed me to understand how to tackle problems at scale, be it the tame, the complex, or the wicked. 500+ students also implies 500+ workplace-based problems which I had the chance to look at. And while working with such an array of problems allows for quite some learning, it also has shown to me that very often it is quite exhaustive for such grown up and seasoned research novices. In response to this, we thus decided to set up the DoctorateHub, so to provide training, mentoring, and coaching services to all those that struggle to get their workplace-based issues identified, analysed, understood, written up in a thesis, and ultimately resolved.
Vladyslav Saviak
Vladyslav Saviak is a Program Manager at SuperCharger Ventures, leading the Online Accelerator and Malta Cohort, where he supports startups in investment readiness, innovation, and sustainable growth. With 5+ years of experience scaling tech companies across Europe, he also serves as a Startup Evaluator for EU-funded programs such as Seeds of Bravery.
Malta Life Sciences Park, Sir Temi Zammit Buildings, San Gwann Industrial Estate, San Gwann, SGN 3000, Malta
