The kick-off meeting of the project Boundary Spanners Development Programme in which our office is included as a partner, was held. The first meeting of the project was organized at 16-17 January in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Our center is represented by our academic director Dr. Zeynep Erden Bayazıt.
During the meeting, all partner organizations made their presentaion about their roles and responsibilities in the project. Furthermore, the partners have worked for the project could go smoothly. The next meeting of the project will be held in Ireland, in the next year.
About Boundary Spanners Development Programme
The Boundary Spanners Development Programme aims to break down the engagement barriers between the universities and their regional/ national/ international business stakeholders by enabling the boundary spanning skills of the higher education faculty, staff, and leadership. We believe that people are the most crucial factor in the transferring of knowledge and innovation across institutions, mobilising resources, triggering organisational change, and making an economic and societal impact in their regions. Ultimately, we aim to create “champions” and bridge the skills and knowledge gap by:
i. identifying boundary spanning skills and practices of the HEIs and Businesses in their collaboration with each other
ii. profiling and analysing 45 boundary spanners in HEIs and businesses in the partner regions and across Europe, while presenting 10+ of those in concise infographic format
iii. developing and pilot testing the Boundary Spanners Workshop Series with 60+ HEI staff in 4, and 45+ SME representatives in 3 partner regions
iv. facilitating 16+ (2 pairs from each HEI region) HEI and Business staff to benefit from University-Industry Staff Exchange Scheme
v. preparing and disseminating the Boundary Spanners Learning and Experience Collection, including 20+ (4x5) Personal Application Project (PAP) cases development and implementation reports, as well as 4 (4x1) PAP good practice videos
vi. organising 8 regional events, policy workshop and Cascading Training to 200+ HEI and business representatives, enhancing exploitation
vii. developing the models for boundary spanners community building, self-assessment and certification for the sustainability of the project results.
The purpose of the Boundary Spanners Development Programme is to empower university faculty and leadership in enhancing the contribution of the HEIs in the regional economic and social development. The programme will be inspired by the University-Business Cooperation Ecosystem, a model founded in years of research for the European Commission and published on extensively
The project is expected to help describe the ‘boundary spanning’ capacity that is deemed as a desired quality for regional innovation, and help instilling it among HE professionals as well as among SME staff, for them to be able to identify and leverage organisational networks for greater institutional and regional impact.
Our team in this project is consist of Prof. Dr. Şebnem BURNAZ, Dr. Zeynep ERDEN BAYAZIT and Dr. Alper YURTTAS.
The other partners of the project;