The objectives of societal outreach approach

The idea is to promote and develop, at the European and international levels:

• a better sharing of knowledge and its dissemination to civil society,
• an increasing impact of science by joining efforts between science, businesses, social institutions, and committed citizens.
• a short- and long-term contribution of scientific research to societal changes,
• the co-creation as the basic principle of collaboration to create the best opportunities to solve social challenges and enable innovative, multi or even transdisciplinary research
• a two way process involving interaction with the goal of generating mutual benefit.

The process

Thus a task group has been created and a survey was conducted among all members of the alliance (based among others on the Edge Tool) and also among students.

This made it possible to:

1. give an overview of societal outreach across the universities members of the alliance, and determine the level of commitment of each member of the alliance,
2. provide with a common definition,
3. establish a recommendation framework for the alliance.

This framework is based on 5 main axis that were selected from the Edge tool: Mission, Strategy, Leadership, Communication, Vision. For each axis, some “intentions” have been identified to strengthen and improve the societal outreach. Moreover, for each intention, the partners of the alliance have pointed out some examples of their own actions related to the intentions.

The proposed ENGAGE.EU “Tarot deck” is to share with other universities and economic partners this societal outreach approach.