Abstract

We would like to share with the EARMA audience a bottom-up initiative launched in the last year at UNIBO that we believe is relevant for the staff working at interface of science. We will tell you how our RM community, located within 5 campuses, 31 departments and 7 interdepartmental centers for industrial research developed a networking action to ‘survive’ in a big and research intensive organization as the oldest Western world university is became.

We started with a powerful aim to foster horizontal connections, mutual learning, and the exchange of best practices.

The kick-off was a meeting carried out through an active well-known co-creation methodology, the world café. We will underline the visions and the ideas that came out and the steps already implemented.

The first act was creating an environment in which peer-to-peer support could happen, raising awareness about RM profile, sharing knowledge, and wellbeing in performing a relatively new and "under construction" professional role.

The pilot aims at mapping the RM in UNIBO in terms of professional profiles, specific contexts, working practices and ‘home rules’. This process will produce an exhaustive representation of the RMs professionals and of the research activities inside the departments.

We are creating a digital platform in which we organize and share information, documents and practical cases regarding all macro-processes of the project cycle, from pre-award to post-award to even the cross-cutting issues. RMs capacity and team building will be sustained also by implementing face-to-face initiatives to balance the convenience of using distance communication technologies with the richness of meetings that presence can provide.

We expected that this informal networking could also give a strong consistency at the organizational model adopted by our University, enhancing the links and the exchange directions within UNIBO’s centre-periphery model. For these reasons this initiative has been welcomed and supported by the Central Coordination of Research Services.

This dialectic represents a great opportunity of human and professional development and alignment of work practices that can lead to thrive the levels of cooperation, multidisciplinarity and even efficiency of the entire research support ecosystem at UNIBO.