Abstract

The InterAct platform allows VITO’s researchers to ask questions or make announcements to colleagues about proposal preparation and project management, in a trusted Teams environment.

There exist open peer-to-peer platforms such as the Belgian BE-ARMA platform, where researchers can exchange best practices about project management in the EU context.
Despite the fact that we promote the use of these tools, we have noticed that people within our organisation are hesitant to use such, because they do not want to share (supposedly) confidential information or new ideas.
Therefore, within VITO, an RTO with almost 1000 employees and therefore sufficient critical mass, we have set up such a platform internally, in parallel with the open platforms.

What kind of questions and (verified) answers?
Posts in the Teams environment concern requests such as 'does anyone have experience with...?', or 'can anyone help me with...?'.
Questions like 'is it true that a high number of milestones can lower the evaluation score?', often lead to pointless rumours and discussions. Therefore, such are to be addressed to VITO’s Research Office for verification, who subsequently publish the verified answers in a searchable format.

Platform in Teams environment
The platform is built in a VITO Teams environment, with a Posts section where researchers can discuss and announce topics related to proposal and project management broadly - hence not limited to HorizonEU but all possible funding sources.
Relevant files can be saved in the Files section, and VITO’s research office publish verified answers and useful links in the Verified Q&A + Links section. In that latter section, guidelines for the desired interaction in the Posts section are also made available.

The VITO InterAct P2P platform intends to be a helpful and user-friendly tool to bring the VITO community forward in the complex funding of research and innovation landscape.

We look forward to fruitful discussions with EARMA partners who are undoubtedly working on similar platforms, in order to learn from each other and make our tools still better.