Abstract

Research and Innovation funding is increasingly focused on addressing the world’s most pressing global challenges. For example, Horizon Europe allocated c. €53.5 billion budget on global challenges research for the period between 2021 - 2027 . To achieve transformational global impact, the research community need to employ interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to research and partnerships.

Global engagement and research management professionals in higher education, play a crucial, but sometimes undervalued, role in fostering international research partnerships. The Research Capacity Strengthening (RCS) pilot project at University College London (UCL) aims to address this challenge by strengthening research management ecosystems.

This pilot project facilitates knowledge exchange and bidirectional fellowship opportunities. Under the pilot, research managers learn about the differing institutional capacities and capabilities and develop pathways for collaborating on research projects throughout the entire research funding pipeline.

This pilot in part builds upon the experience of UCL research managers who participated on the in the Erasmus+ funded StoRM project (Strengthening of Collaboration, Leadership and Professionalisation in Research Management in Southern Africa and EU Higher Education Institutions).

Outcomes and Impact

Key Pilot activity:
– Strand 1 - Creation of Overseas Partnership toolkit and templates. Resources to be open and accessible to UCL staff and overseas partners.
– Strand 2 - Interactive Knowledge Sharing. A series of workshops and seminars with speakers from UCL and partner institutes.
– Strand 3 - In June 2023, three fellows from two UCL partners in South Africa (Wits University and the University of Cape Town) visited UCL under the bidirectional fellowship scheme. Three fellows from UCL will have a reciprocal visit to Wits and UCT in October 2023.

In the future, the project will explore scaling to other countries and regions where UCL has strategic partners.

Initial feedback from the inbound fellowship to UCL has been immensely positive, with the following immediate results:
– new relationships have been forged between pre and post-award colleagues, and immediate collaboration commenced between UCT, Wits and UCL to jointly address new funder requirements and explore opportunities to submit joint applications that address global challenges.
– Two potential spin-off projects have been proposed in pre-award and Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) spaces.
– Fellows who visited UCL have supported identification of funding priority areas for an internal seed funding programme.

Learning Outcomes
We are keen to garner feedback from delegates who have run similar schemes or may do so in the future, We would be particularly interested to receive feedback from research managers based in Universities in Low- or Middle-Income Countries (LMICs)