aUPaEU

The aUPaEU project is a collaboration of partners from the Unite! and EPICUR Alliances. Five Universities are involved in the project: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya , also including IThinkUPC , Grenoble INP - UGA , Politecnico di Torino, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu and Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT).

Following the Greek concept of the Agora, the project seeks to build a shared space, a platform where all stakeholders can give and consume acceleration services and, at the same time, contribute their knowledge and expertise.

The University Partnership for Acceleration of European Universities (aUPaEu) project has received 3.4 million funding from the European Commission in the framework of the European Research Area call (HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ERA-01) for the integration and implementation of acceleration services. The project started in January 2023 and will end in December 2027.

aUPaEU's ultimate purpose is to develop methodologies, sustainability plans, coaching services, and tangible digital technologies to give an acceleration agora. HEIs, university networks, and alliances will achieve integrated, shared, and long-term R&I transformations through this accelerated agora. These transformations are intended to focus on six major areas of the HEI transformation agenda: capacity, infrastructure, and resource sharing; researcher career attractiveness; collaboration with R&I ecosystem actors; open science; societal outreach; and gender equality.

The overall success of Unite!WIDENING project will be supported by the development and achievement of the specific objectives:

Analysis of current status of the areas from the HEI transformation agenda: Analyse European Universities' efforts in relation to several facets of HEI transformation, such as capacity, infrastructure, and resource sharing, the attractiveness of researcher careers, collaboration with R&I ecosystem actors, open science, societal outreach, and gender equality. The analysis aims to develop a shared knowledge base, identify effective solutions and best practises, and give suggestions and a catalogue of acceleration services to be supplied by the aUPaEU agora.

Make recommendations for the design of a European Degree label with a view to maximising its attractiveness and potential impact: The project consortium will facilitate consultation meetings with national accreditation agencies and other stakeholders. In addition, several large-scale online surveys will be organised tailored to 1) accreditation agencies in all participating countries, 2) students and 3) employers across Europe.

Definition of a methodology for an investment strategy to facilitate access of HEIs to transformation: Mapping the crucial support resources and providing consulting services on access to funding from EU, national, and regional sources become critical in their pursuit of a transformation agenda in order to ensure the long-term viability of the suggested acceleration measures. Cooperation methods for scientist-to-scientist, HEI-to-HEI, and network-to-network relations to find finance lines for joint research ideas, as well as investment strategies, are proven sustainable R&I funding techniques.

Provision of coaching services and support mechanisms for institutional transformation of HEIs in various areas: The project aims to establish best practices and coaching services for all stakeholders, as well as to guide HEIs on how to adopt these best practices inside the agora of acceleration services. The coaching services include a wide range of HEI transformation agenda topics, such as cooperative R&I agendas, infrastructure sharing, boosting researcher careers, open science, and R&I outreach.

Development of a digital Agora to provide tangible acceleration services towards HEIs transformation: One of the primary goals of aUPaEU is to serve as a virtual meeting place for HEIs, university networks, and alliances to connect with peers, other ecosystem actors, investors, and public funders. Integrating infrastructures and resources from individual HEIs, alliances, and HEI networks, as well as offering enhanced data bases and centralised dashboards, in order to speed progress on previously identified transformation areas.

Implementation of a monitoring mechanism to assess progress in the transformation efforts of user groups: The acceleration services will be tested on a wide number of users (individual HEIs, alliances of universities and their surrounding ecosystem actors, or HEI organisations). The services' progress with user groups and the agora of acceleration on the focus transformation agenda areas will be evaluated and validated.

Engagement with key stakeholders, including HEIs, university networks and alliances, umbrella organisations, funding agencies, policy makers and civil society to implement co-creation and feedback strategy to spread the project message: The project devotes significant resources to the dissemination and communication strategy, with the goal of engaging and informing user groups and other potential end-users about the project's primary findings, opening the path for the adoption of the project's methodology and conclusions.
aUPaEU intends to provide a recommendation package to assist project partners and their networks in promoting acceleration services at the level of policymakers and funders, thereby ensuring consistent policy support and national/regional funding.