29 September 2022
aUPaEU is Unite!'s new acceleration services project for higher education institutions
A University Partnership for Acceleration of European Universities (aUPaEu) is the first collaborative project between two European university alliances, Unite! and EPiCUR.
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 and will start in January 2023.
aUPaEU is based on the collaboration of five academic institutions that are part of two university alliances. On the side of Unite!: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech, IThinkUPC, Grenoble INP - UGA Institut d'ingénierie et de management, Politecnico di Torino. For EPiCUR: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT).
With this collaboration, the partners aim to integrate and implement acceleration services in the context of a coordinated support system for higher education institutions (HEIs), networks, university alliances and their umbrella organizations.
“All European University Alliances are in need for better IT interfaces in order to ease the access and exchange to our rich offers for students and academics. Thus, it only makes sense that we are here working together across alliances to provide such improved services.” says Andreas Winkler, Secretary General of Unite!
“The aUPaEU project is the demonstration that the European Universities Alliances are able to foster ideas and collaboration among the universities of the same alliance as well as creating synergies with other alliances. The acceleration services to be developed in aUPaEU will help boosting the R&I institutional transformations that are currently pursued in the Unite! Alliance with the pilot activities of the UNITE.H2020 project” says Roberto Zanino, Politecnico di Torino's Key Liaison Officer and coordinator of UNITE.H2020 – the UNITE.H2020 SwafS project aimed at developing the R&I dimension of the Unite! Alliance.
Following the Greek concept of the agora, the project will seek to build a shared space where all stakeholders can give and consume acceleration services and, at the same time, contribute their knowledge and expertise. Access to this space will be accessible, diverse and inclusive.
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.
For Jesús Alcober, coordinator of the project “The aUPaEu partners' cooperative effort aims at building and deploying models of acceleration services for similar organizations, particularly those in widening countries, allowing the application of the outcomes of UNITE.H2020 and EPICUR-Research projects and their collective experience in European higher education institutions (HEIs), networks, university alliances and their umbrella organizations.”