Abstract

European University alliances have established jointly shared services. Setting up a transnational Research Support requires new structures and processes to be negotiated, piloted and revised. European University Alliances are and act as a consortium of individual universities, and each institution has its very own national and institutional environment. The motivation for developing a Transnational Research Support is due to the constant demand for funding to enable joint research (i.e. mobility of researchers, networking, organisation of joint events, support of and exchange of doctoral students and post-docs). ECIU and Unite! share and discuss with the conference participants their challenges, risks, solutions, and good practices when in comes to collaboration in research management. They will also present how they have developed with different solutions strategic alliances in university services.
The challenges comprise strategy, leadership, resources and commitment affairs, operating beyond and outside institutional borders/frameworks.
The risks relate to the decision-making process, sense of ownership of the shared structures, resources, time horizon, and expectation management.
The solutions touch upon leadership around academic freedom and curiosity-driven research; actions without top-down decision-making, bottom-up initiatives of professionals, IT-infrastructures.
Good practices to be shared can broadly be transferred to any trans-institutional service models in Research Management and buy-in of influential researchers.
Transnational Research Support in European University Alliances deals with risk management seen in industrial joint ventures.