Our activities on research and innovation strategies
Given module 1 ambition and the high number of potential research and innovation possibilities across the CIVIS Alliance, several steps need to be taken to reach our objectives.
First, it was crucial to map research and innovations strategies and research profiles at each member university. The mapping was conducted by each partner university respectively based on how research and innovation strategies and research profiles were presented and communicated. One finding was that it was rare that specific and detailed research strategies were defined at the university level. At this level it was more common to communicate in general terms about profiles in established research and innovation areas. The conclusion from the mapping activities was then that the most typical strategy communicated by the partner universities for research and innovation was that quality and relevance in research and innovation is generated through bottom-up processes. It was also made clear that the main barriers for research and innovation collaboration to happen are funding, balance between maintaining established and investing in new contacts and partnerships, individual meritocracy issues, and university ranking and ratings.
Second, and regarding these findings, the activities in module 1 were focused on developing tools for simplifying and encouraging bottom-up generated research and innovation activities and collaboration across the alliance with a potential to overcome the barriers in the long run. With this in mind, it was decided to develop a digital platform for the alliance where information about research and innovation interests, profiles, projects, programs, researchers and research groups/centers/institutes/laboratories were shared and made available as user friendly as possible. It was also decided that this should not be just another site where researchers should upload original information separately. It should be a site where already uploaded information at the partner universities respectively as far as possible should be linked to this platform.
Third, a number of activities within the module followed about how to sort and structure the platform and how to communicate the information. In some cases, legal issues about publishing links to information published elsewhere had to be dealt with, and some universities had to, at least to some extent, translate information to English to make it more transparent for all partners in the alliance.
Finally, we are now in the process of launching our case study, the digital platform, which will run until the end of 2023: Establishing an interactive information platform to be a single place to learn about on-going research and innovation across the CIVIS alliance.
