Abstract

A sustainability plan aims to outline the strategic actions to ensure the sustainability of the project’s activities and provide its stakeholders with a clear picture of what could be done to ensure the obtention of results after the end of the funding. A sustainable development of activities does not rely only on project findings and their potential exploitation, but it is also linked to the development of solid partnerships and relations between project members and all the relevant stakeholders and networks that could help to maintain or expand the outputs after the end of the project. Nowadays, many funders request the submission of such a document, and some consider it as a mandatory deliverable. Researchers and scientific project managers without a business background feel challenged when conceptualizing and planning a sustainability plan due to misconceptions about the tasks, their roles and other aspects that often lead to the production of meaningless documents that do not really contribute to the long-term sustainability of the project.

Here we proposed a straightforward procedure for the development of a tailor-made sustainability plan for MOSBRI, an EU funded project in its early stages (within the first 2 years), designed and implemented in the frame of the European Commission work programme for research infrastructures (RI). Considered as a living document, this sustainability plan could also serve as a starting point for the development of exploitation strategies or potentially a business plan.

We could identify and describe 6 key activities from group exercises such as on-line and in-person meetings, e-mail exchanges and a survey which collected the project needs and expectations from partners. Due to the RI nature of the MOSBRI project, these activities correspond to 3 major categories: Joint Research Activities (JRA), service provision (Transnational Access – TNA) and education, training, and networking.

The activities proposed in this sustainability plan will be maturated by the “activity leaders” within the project, particularly those regarding the JRA projects that have not yet been launched and for which no preliminary outcomes are available at this time. Other actions like the establishment of synergies with external partners have been initiated immediately in order to facilitate the identification of potential funding sources for the future and the coordination of proposals submission. The identification of these key activities helped us to apply to a consultancy service (Horizon Results Booster - HRB) for the design of an exploitation strategy for our project. HRB is a free of charge service offered by the European Commission to help maximizing the impact of research funded by the EU.

My aim is to share my experience with other RMAs and to show them that proposing a clear and coherent sustainability plan for a research project is achievable for people without a business background.