Abstract

Some of the challenges every large organization has, when it comes to participation to European programmes and that normally impact the research support systems activities are:
• Creation of collaboration dialogues with other organisations to generate proposals
• The possibility to have fast and easy access to available expertise for specific collaborations generation
• The possibility to facilitate/stimulate the participation of newcomer scientists
In particular, the search for available expertise or the identification of interested professors in EU calls participation in most of the cases results in a "treasure hunt" exercise driven by personal relations or "word by mouth" approaches.
Mapping exercises represent one of the possible solutions, but they are normally not well received by busy professors/researchers having limited time to respond to questionnaires or hardly noticing this kind of e-mails in crowded mailboxes.
Having this in mind, NTNU Brussels office have recently developed and launched a University wide mapping exercise to collect reseachers’ interests in the upcoming calls of Horizon Europe based on tools and approaches conceived to approach the above listed limitations.
The information is collected through an “easy to compile” online questionnaire conceived to take 30-40 minutes maximum for its completion in order to motivate the researchers/professors to compile it.
The final outcome is a set of Brochures (one per cluster) that are currently collecting more than 200 Professors’/Researchers profiles thanks to an extensive and continuous internal promotion of the exercise to maximise the critical mass of collected information.
The Brochures have been conceived to guarantee:
• Easy navigation on the information about NTNU researchers’ interests’ profile per topic
• Full configurability and updatability to guarantee easy inclusion of latest relevant information gathered through the questionnaire
• Large external visibility to guarantee impact to the final outcome supported by an extensive awareness campaign
The Brochures are publicly downloadable at: https://www.ntnu.edu/web/brussels/horizon-europe-mapping and have a dual relevance both at external and internal level as they represent:
• A catalogue of internal experts open for collaboration in Horizon Europe calls that can be used by external players willing to collaborate with NTNU
• A catalogue of possible “customers” to be helped in proposals’ preparation by the Research support system at NTNU
After the first round of Horizon Europe calls, a survey will be sent to participating researchers to assess the impact of the whole activity in order to define the way it will be performed for the calls 2023-2024.
The proposed presentation will provide an overview of the strategies and approaches adopted to implement this activity, of the tools used to collect the information and edit it and of the Communication campaign used to make it visible.
A special thank you for this work should be addressed to all the Faculties’ and Strategic Areas colleagues at NTNU that have contributed by providing the technical contents needed to create appealing Cluster brochures as well as in making the mapping activity widely visible internally.