The UPC participated in the 3rd Unite! Dialogue Grenoble and will host the 4th instalment in Barcelona
The UPC, as a partner university of the Unite! alliance, joined the third instalment of the Unite! Dialogue, which took place from 8th to 10th March 2021 in Grenoble. This regular meeting between the members of the alliance and key guests is a great opportunity to strengthen the links and foster further collaboration within the alliance.
Mar 10, 2021
The Unite! Dialogue Grenoble is a 3-day event had a transversal impact on the Unite! alliance. With a first and third day of internal management meetings, it is the second day that gathered most participants and attention, as it was open to all Uniters working on the different teams, who collaborated in different sessions to build up on the main objectives of the alliance and pool knowledge and tools. Two professors of the UPC led two of the parallel sessions of the Dialogue on key aspects of the alliance:
Prof. Josep Bordonau, from the Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB), led the session "Engaging companies in Unite! international ecosystems", where they analised strategies to engage companies and other stakeholders to the regional innovation networks.
Additionally, Prof. Bordonau contributed to the session on "Network of Technology Transfer Offices and roadmap", dedicated to foster collaboration between the TTOs (Technology Transfer Offices) to reinforce the Academia-Business cooperation in Research and Innovation (R&I).
Prof. Jesus Alcober, from the Institute of Education Sciences, leads the session "A Unite! Metacampus", where he presented a new joint platform for the alliance that will provide a meeting point for all members in the Unite! ecosystem to exchange information and opportunities born within the alliance.
To conclude the Dialogue, UPC's vice-rector Juan Jesús Pérez participated in the closing session by inviting the more than 200 attendants to the next Unite! Dialogue Barcelona, that will be organised by the UPC in November 2021. This Dialogue will also act as branding event, opening Unite! to the world after two years as one of the future European University alliances.
The 3rd Unite Dialogue Grenoble also included interesting novelties worth highlighting. On the one hand, this is the first time in which a Dialogue had a Public Session, open to guests outside Unite!, which built on the efforts to foster interest for the alliances and promote their broad impact in the European Higher Education landscape.
On the other hand, in order to further align with the bottom-up and co-creation principles of the alliance, all Uniters were invited to contribute to defining the core sessions of the event. This allowed the Unite! community to define what contents and concerns should be addressed, highly benefiting the alliance and its progress.
Last, but not least, the first Unite! Student Forum took place during the 3rd Unite! Dialogue Grenoble. SURE! (standing for Students in Unite! for Representation and Power) is the student-self-organised body within Unite!. Being both agents and beneficiaries of the alliance, Unite! students have a key role in the future of the alliance and all European Universities and greatly contributed to the Dialogue as Uniters with their unique experience.
