The European University Association (EUA) is pleased to announce that it is launching a major new project, EUIMA, – funded by the European Commission – designed to support European universities in implementing specific modernisation agenda objectives as outlined in the Lisbon Strategy.
New challenges in education, research and innovation call for new tools and methodologies to keep the European higher education sector an essential player in global competition. Two key areas have been chosen as the focus of the project: establishing sustainable funding and financial management tools for universities, in particular the development of full costing in universities (their ability to better identify the costs of all their activities and projects); and also the need to promote successful collaborative research projects between universities and a wide range of external partners (including business, regional government etc.).
EUA is today launching the two-year EUIMA project (European Universities Implementing Modernisation Agenda) to address both these issues by supporting a series of events and activities that will bring together university actors and external stakeholders to exchange good practices and encourage mutual learning. A third transversal focus running through the project in addressing these two main issues will be to identify requirements for further development of human resources in universities to enhance the attractiveness of university careers.
In terms of modernising financial management, EUA will support a series of workshops throughout Europe designed for university management, funders, research councils and governments etc to specifically increase the development of full costing initiatives within universities and also to support its development at the national level. This will support EUA’s current work on reinforcing the financial sustainability of Europe’s universities – which is being carried through the EUDIS project (European Universities Diversifying Income Streams). The workshops will be supported by a series of study visits to universities that are more advanced in the domain of financial management – to enable practitioners to get hands on advice and training.
In terms of collaborative research projects, through a number of selected case studies and eight workshops, EUIMA-Collaborative Research will contribute to the development of monitoring tools and indicators for the assessment of university-based collaborative research. The project builds on experience from previous and current EUA work looking at building strong relationships between universities and industry for doctoral education and the professional insertion of PhD holders (DOC-CAREERS & the current project DOC-CAREERS II) as well as at the exchange of good practice in collaborative research through the Responsible Partnering Initiative. Following the EUA study “Regions of Knowledge”, the project will address the specificities of regional contexts. The workshops will support universities who wish to strengthen their collaborative research through promotion of good practices in relation to different external partners, business enterprises, regional authorities, non-government organisations, civil society organisations etc.