Abstract

Høgskulen på Vestlandet (HVL) is a young organisation, born in 2017 as the result of the merge of three university colleges in the region of Western Norway. From the start, the ambition to become a full university arose as a strategic goal. HVL plans to apply for full university status in 2023 and the leadership has been mobilising all forces within our four faculties and our central administration across its five campuses, as an organisation-wide endeavour.
The research support office plays a central in this process. The number of externally funded research projects must be increased to meet the accreditation requirements, mostly from the Research Council of Norway and Horizon Europe, while only 10% of our academic staff apply for external funding. We identified early on challenges and opportunities for our office, its staff, and its leadership: How can we motivate researchers to apply more? How can we identify the most promising research groups? How to increase both the quantity and quality of our proposals? How can we build a culture for external funding? How to support better our researchers in practice? Which skills do we have within our team, which skills do we need to deepen or develop? How do we evolve from a small, agile, multitasking team to a larger, more specialised and structured service?
These are rather universal challenges that any RMA encounters. However, we had very limited time to obtain quick results and contribute to our transition from university college to university. Our journey to transform ourselves led to major changes which impacted our work, and ourselves. During our presentation, we will share the main measures we have implemented: a new organisational structure, different motivation activities and training courses for research staff, the flagging and follow up of a small number of highly promising research groups, new hands-on support for the pre-award phase, the creation of a new team dedicated to project coordination, and the recruitment of new colleagues to boost our capacity and skillset, among others. We will also share their effects and why some of have been successful while others did not meet our expectations.
For our first presentation at the EARMA conference, we believe that our transition can be relevant for other RMAs impacted by similar objectives or pressure coming from the top level of their organisations.