Isabelle Corbett-Etchevers, Grenoble IAE Graduate School of Management; Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)
As students, academics and university personnel across Europe head back to university, very few are aware that their university is likely to be part of the European University Initiative. Cooperation across European universities strengthened in 2019 with the launch of European university alliances, a project supporting the internationalisation of European higher education, testing action plans and setting priorities for long-term strategic institutional transformation (Estermann et al., 2021).
There are now over 65 European university alliances, encompassing more than 570 higher education institutions and 11 million students across Europe. Described as flagships of the European University Initiative, they aim to improve the international competitiveness of higher education in Europe, promote European values and identity through greater mobility. Joint or dual degrees with different European universities, or the European Student Card were developed with this in mind.
These initiatives among European higher education institutions are key in forging European identity and developing key skills in a context of growing global competition and societal challenges. Europe’s higher education strategy was built on two pillars: education and research & innovation.
The two pillars of universities: teaching and research
In terms of teaching, the Erasmus student mobility program for education, vocational training, youth and sport is undoubtedly the best-known EU initiative. Launched in 1987, Erasmus has now morphed into Erasmus+. The program paved the way for the Bologna Process, started in 1999 when 29 countries expressed their willingness to commit to enhance the competitiveness of the European Higher Education Area through the progressive forging of a unified educational space, leading to the standardisation of higher education degrees into the 3-5-8 cycle (Bachelor-Master-Doctorate) and the development of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS).
As for the second pillar, framework programmes to develop cooperation in research and innovation have been ongoing since 1984 and have evolved into the Horizon research funding programmes.
A single, borderless market for research
In 2000, the European Commission launched the European Research Area (ERA). Echoing the “four freedoms” of the European single market area: free movement of goods, capital, labour; freedom to establish and provide services, ERA is described as “a single, borderless market for research, innovation and technology across the EU where countries come together and improve their research policies and systems and where there is free movement of researchers, knowledge and innovation.”. This fifth freedom has been further emphasised in the Letta policy report (April, 2024), so named after former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta.
Dwelling on ERA’s objective, the current Horizon Europe programme (2021-2027) with a budget of 93.5 billion euros aims to “facilitate collaboration and strengthen the impact of research and innovation in developing, supporting and implementing EU policies while tackling global challenges”.
Bridging the two pillars and accelerating the transformation of European universities
Horizon Europe attempts to bridge the two pillars supporting higher education through the integration of research & innovation into the European University Initiative.
Among the funded projects, aUPaEU 2 has brought together five universities belonging to two alliances – Epicur European University and Unite! – University network for innovation technology and engineering – to develop a modern-day agora, a shared digital space for researchers, businesses, and citizens with the aim of enhancing collaboration, strengthening relationships, and transferring knowledge to the economy. The acceleration services under development are as varied as the potential users. These include a directory listing researchers’ area of expertise, access to funding, collaboration opportunities, guidelines for researchers’ career management, open science, gender equality. Mirroring common research project management practices, each member university is responsible for a specific work package and contributes deliverables to the European Commission, which is designed to ultimately inform higher education policy.
Early findings from interviews and focus groups with different users highlight the digital Agora’s potential opportunities but also the tensions that need to be addressed to foster sustainable collaboration for research and innovation across universities.
Short-term funding versus long-term transformation
aUPaEU like most projects within the European University Initiative is a five-year pilot project. This short-term horizon is supposed to allow experimentation and flexibility.
However, it comes at odds with the ambition of developing long-term strategic institutional transformation. The uncertainty at the end of the five-year funding makes it difficult to establish a long-lasting governance model and strategy for collaboration in R&I.
Enabling online trust
Trust is at the heart of collaboration. Traditionally, academic conferences, lab visits, word of mouth have triggered personal connections and research collaboration. While online platforms can help facilitate knowledge-sharing processes, trust enabled knowledge-sharing remains dependent on offline interaction (Aalbers and Whelan,2021). Finding the right balance between online and offline connections will be necessary. The fragmentation of digital infrastructure, with a number of platforms and tools already in use, raises questions about the Agora’s added-value. Ease of use and compatibility with existing tools will be key for adoption.
Visibility and engagement
University alliances are reshaping European university education unknown to most of their stakeholders – students, academics and staff. Beyond a core group of actively engaged contributors to the work packages, alliances, with their complex governance structure, remain vaguely understood, remote from the reality of the day-to-day run of activities. Differences in national education systems, the prevalence of local concerns, cultural and language differences (Taylor, D. A., & Corbett-Etchevers, I., 2025) make it challenging to foster a sense of collective identity across European universities.
Yet, it is precisely this awareness to shared values, such as commitment to inclusion and diversity, innovation, the green transition and high-quality higher education, which can pave the way towards a truly transnational European University.
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Isabelle Corbett-Etchevers, Enseignant-chercheur en gestion des ressources humaines, Grenoble IAE Graduate School of Management; Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.