Higher education and regional engagement: EUA participation in meeting of Directors General of HE

On 22 and 23 April, EUA participated in the latest meeting of the Directors General of Higher Education organised under the Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU in Dublin. The latest event, which brought together Directors General and heads of national rectors’ conferences, focused on higher education and regional engagement and development.
Following an introductory presentation on the “benefits and barriers” of regional engagement, the first session highlighted three case studies of different types of engagement provided by the European Institute for Innovation and Technology, EIT (Co-location centre model), the Campus Engage project at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and finally an example in Ireland of a consortium of universities and companies coming together to custom-design programmes to meet skills needs in ICT.
This was followed by a discussion and presentations on supporting and evaluating engagement and regional connectivity of HEIs, and the role of the European Structural and Investment funds in supporting higher education. This was an opportunity for EUA to underline the work it is doing in this area and particularly following the recent joint EUA - JRC expert meeting to discuss the role of universities in research and innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation.
This joint (EUA-JRC) initiative was the “first step” in a process of partnership building between universities and regions in implementing the “Smart Specialisation Strategy” and the monitoring of its future success. EUA and EC-JRC in Seville will now take forward the outcomes of this event and will work towards developing a set of guidelines for regional-university cooperation in RIS3 with the objective to inform future policy development and raise the awareness of how best to take advantage of the synergies between the competitive funds through Horizon 2020 and the Structural and Cohesion Funds. More information and presentations from the Directors General event are available here.