Abstract

EU Missions are a novelty of the Horizon Europe programme representing a new way to bring concrete solutions to some of our greatest challenges. They have ambitious goals and are expected to deliver concrete results by 2030. In particular, they will deliver impact by putting research and innovation into a new role, combined with new forms of governance and collaboration, as well as by engaging citizens.
In consideration of the multidisciplinary nature of these new instruments and of the strategic nature they have, an NTNU strategy is designed, aimed to possibly support and guarantee a high degree of participation of our university’s researchers in the future projects responding to Missions’ calls.
The strategy is conceived to also increase NTNU visibility and positioning at EU level through the implementation of a structured approach aimed to:
• Identify the “must have” topics versus the “likely to have” ones matching the University’s priority
• Identify the critical mass of knowledge available and interested to be engaged in specific Missions’ calls
• Define a possible Multidisciplinary cross faculty participation to targeted calls
• Facilitate the participation of NTNU’s researchers’ community
To guarantee participation and ensure co-ownership and motivation from the involved community, the strategy is designed through a co-design approach involving all the interested researchers and supported by the NTNU Brussels office, the NTNU Central level and the relevant Internal strategic areas.
The activities are organised along three different phases:
• An initial Mapping of the available expertise of the NTNU researchers interested to participate to the Mission’s opportunities.
• The analysis of the collected information and the drafting of the basis of the possible strategic approach from NTNU
• A co-design of the final strategic planning by mean of specific strategic discussions with the respondents identify the strategically important topics and to design specific and tailored actions .

The defined strategic approaches are including (among all) aspects like: Selected calls of relevance, relevant key players and the gateways to them, coordination vs participation approach, competitive advantages and track records, cross faculty participation, etc…
These actions are designed on a variable geometry basis by considering the different levels of maturity of university’s engagement in Missions which varies across the five of them.
The aim is in all cases to support the researchers in achieving the possible largest participation in future submitted proposals to Mission’s calls.

Learning outcome:
This approach represents a new way to target EC opportunities and therefore it will imply also a “learning by doing” element that will be developed jointly between research managers, research administrators and the researchers’ interested in the strategic positioning for future Mission calls.