Abstract

Whilst international collaborations were often the realm of the international office in our HEIs, there is a growing focus on the development of strategic research collaborations, either bilateral or multilateral in nature (and always multicultural), either arising from a bottom-up or as a part of a top-down institutional approach and increasingly coupled with educational collaboration (a multifunctional approach). Such Institutional level multifunctional collaborations brings together Universities who will collaborate on major research initiatives that leverage their individual resources and are strategically relevant to the partners. Such strategic collaboration development may be solely within Europe (such as structured collaborations within the Framework Programmes, some aspects of the European Universities Initiative) or international , where there is an emphasis on widening or extend to global collaborations where issues around foreign interference and ensuring partnerships of parity and inclusion must be explicitly factored in.
This session aims to share insights and examine the challenges and practices involved in building different types of strategic research collaborations, both bottom up and top down, bilateral and multilateral, within and beyond Europe looking also at the added complexity of a multifunctional approach. Whilst the goal of such partnerships is for universities (and their researchers) to work much more collaboratively together on matter of mutual strategic interest, none the less there is a need for the RMA communities to also come together and provide the requisite support structures. To be successful, collaborations depend on adequate and appropriate support from a variety of professional service teams including RMAs.
The emphasis in this session is on the role that RMAs play in developing and operationalising such collaborations. How can RMA communities work together to achieve transformation and higher cooperation? What specific organisational arrangements and skillsets are needed and what are the pitfalls and learnings? What similarities are there between education and research collaboration? How can we launch a dialogue with International Offices colleagues to exchange best practices and learn from each other? What is the view of researchers? How do we extend partnerships to Africa and other countries outside of Europe? What resources are needed to enable such collaborations to happen? How can you use EU/National instrumentation to help build such collaborations?