Michela Magas

Director of Research & Innovation and Chair, Industry Commons Foundation
ORCID 0000-0001-9607-9101

Michela Magas is Chair and Director of Research & Innovation at the Industry Commons Foundation in Stockholm, and the originator of the Industry Commons: a methodology that lets companies, researchers and public bodies across a value chain work on shared data and intellectual assets without giving up their competitive position. She created the concept in 2015 while co-chairing the Innovation Ecosystems working group of the Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI), and set out its research foundations with Dimitris Kiritsis in the International Journal of Production Research (2021). She has spent more than thirty years building spaces of common understanding between disparate domains. Her research concerns innovation ecosystems, cross-domain interoperability, and the enabling systems, ontologies and knowledge graphs that allow knowledge to be transferred and exploited across disciplines and industrial sectors.

She leads the foundation’s contribution to the Horizon Europe projects GRAPHIA, which develops knowledge graphs and AI services for research in the social sciences and humanities and in which ICF is responsible for innovation management and exploitation, and LUMEN, which builds interoperable discovery platforms across mathematics, the social sciences and humanities, Earth system science and molecular dynamics within the European Open Science Cloud, and through which ICF is establishing the EOSC Innovation Centre. In Sweden she leads ICF’s work in the Vinnova-funded projects TRE4HealthAI, on trusted research environments for healthcare AI, and MedChain, a secure medical product passport for circular and resilient value chains, in which ICF leads the work package on standards, interoperability and data models. She was Innovation and Sustainability Manager of OntoCommons (Horizon 2020), which created an ontology ecosystem for cross-domain industrial interoperability, and directed the Vinnova-funded JUST Data project, coordinated by ICF, which set out a practice of judicious, unbiased, safe and transparent data annotation now being carried into healthcare AI.

She has contributed to the European Commission’s definitions of innovation ecosystems, Digital Innovation Hubs and the European Innovation Council. She served on President von der Leyen’s High-Level Round Table for the New European Bauhaus, advised the G7 leaders through the Innovation 7 group, and has advised national and regional governments in Germany, Portugal, Croatia, Finland and Sweden. In 2017 the European Commission named her European Woman Innovator of the Year, the first from the creative industries, following the Innovation Luminary Award for Creative Innovation in 2016. She founded Music Tech Fest in 2012, which grew into MTF Labs, an innovation community of some 9,000 contributors across industry, academia, science and the arts.

Selected publications

Emanuilov, I., Larsson, B., Dubber, A. and Magas, M. (2025). White Paper on Advancing Trusted Research Environments for Healthcare AI. Industry Commons Foundation.

Magas, M. and Emanuilov, I. (2024). Open Innovation in the Industry Commons. European IP Helpdesk Bulletin: Open Innovation, No. 8, October 2024. European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency.

Emanuilov, I. and Magas, M. (2024). White Paper on Data Documentation for JUST Data Practices. Zenodo.

Magas, M. (contributor) in Martin, C. et al. (2022). Backing Visionary Entrepreneurs: Realising the Deep-Tech Entrepreneurial Talent of Europe. Report of the EIC Expert Group on Design of the EIC Marketplace and Tech to Market Activities, European Innovation Council.

Magas, M. and Kiritsis, D. (2021). Industry Commons: an ecosystem approach to horizontal enablers for sustainable cross-domain industrial innovation. International Journal of Production Research. DOI 10.1080/00207543.2021.1989514.