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WISE: From Widening to Urban Sustainability Innovation and Excellence

WISE: From Widening to Urban Sustainability Innovation and Excellence

Program:

Horizon Europe – WIDERA, European Excellence Initiative (EEI)

Project objective

WISE – From Widening to Urban Sustainability Innovation and Excellence builds on cooperation within the Transform4Europe (T4EU) European University Alliance. Its aim is to strengthen research and innovation cooperation among European higher education institutions and connect them more closely with businesses, public authorities and civil society.

At the heart of WISE is urban sustainability, which provides a common field for strengthening research excellence, generating new knowledge and developing solutions to the challenges faced by contemporary cities and regions. The project brings together 11 higher education institutions and five non-academic partners, working through a quadruple-helix approach that connects academia and research, industry, the public sector and civil society.

WISE pursues three main objectives:

to raise scientific excellence and strengthen knowledge valorisation, including through improvements in research management, research assessment and strategic planning;
to enhance the global competitiveness and visibility of higher education institutions and build a critical mass of expertise in urban sustainability;
to improve researchers’ career development through training, mobility, transferable skills and the promotion of open science, equality, diversity and inclusion.

An important part of WISE is the implementation of three collaborative research and innovation projects bringing together partners from different countries and sectors: innovative timber solutions for sustainable construction (WELCOME), advanced approaches to urban vegetation monitoring (RESURGE), and research into policy learning and the transfer of successful policies and approaches between cities, regions and countries (PoliSCi). Approximately EUR 0.99 million of the project budget is allocated to these three projects.

RRA LUR will play a particularly active role in the PoliSCi research project, which will develop and test a comparative model of policy learning and transfer across different governance and regional contexts. The aim is to better understand how successful urban sustainability and resilience policies can be adapted to different local circumstances and which factors enable or hinder their successful transfer. RRA LUR will contribute its regional development expertise and provide access to the Ljubljana Urban Region as one of the contexts examined within the research.

Expected project results

WISE will contribute to a more modern, connected and competitive European research and innovation ecosystem, strengthening the institutional capacities of universities, researchers’ careers and cooperation with local and regional innovation environments.

Key expected results include the implementation of institutional reforms related to CoARA and the professionalisation of Research Management and Administration (RMA); the establishment of the WISE Skills Academy, offering 39 training modules and 16 mobility schemes and reaching at least 900 researchers and staff; three international research and innovation projects in urban sustainability; and a stronger pipeline of joint European project proposals.

The project will also establish an international WISE Community of Practice, connecting universities, research organisations, businesses, public authorities and civil society. Greater involvement of citizens and local stakeholders in research and innovation processes, together with open science and responsible research-data management, will be an important part of the project approach.

Important practical outputs of PoliSCi, in which RRA LUR participates, will include practical guidelines for policy transfer in European cities, dedicated guidelines for Ukrainian cities, a series of policy papers and a comparative report on policy learning and transfer. The research will combine document analysis, interviews with policymakers, public administrators and civic actors, fieldwork and co-creation activities.

In addition to PoliSCi, RRA LUR will participate in the WISE Community of Practice, support city-to-region Living Labs and citizen-engagement activities, and help connect regional experience with policy discussions at EU level through its involvement in the RegHub network.