The Arqus European University Alliance brings together seven longstanding prestigious comprehensive research-intensive universities who share extensive experience in joint projects and a similar profile as internationalized institutions with deep regional engagement. Through this project, Arqus aims to enhance the research and innovation dimension of the Alliance’s activities and to address current global societal challenges through intensified joint research characterised by the pursuit of excellence, openness, transparency and effective engagement with society. Based on analysis of existing strengths, prior cooperation and shared strategic research interests, the Alliance will focus on the fields of Artificial Intelligence/Digital Transformation and Green Deal/Climate Change as transversal priority areas for enhanced research collaboration, characterised by their interdisciplinarity. The project is organised around three major challenges, all intended to foster a context to nurture sustainable strengthened collaboration. The first addresses Joint Science and Innovation, through building an Arqus research community, and designing a roadmap for transformation(al) excellence. The second centres on New Perspectives on Research, seeking to strengthen human capital through alternative approaches to assessment and recognition, and to re-thinking transfer, with special reference to the Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. The third, Open to Society, focusses on the culture change brought by Open and Citizen Science. Arqus Research & Innovation aims to complement and build on efforts already underway to foster scientific cooperation within the European University consortium, and to seek synergies between the education, research and innovation dimensions of Arqus.

InSPIRES brings together practitioners and experts from across and beyond Europe to co-design, jointly pilot, implement and roll out innovative models for Science Shops (SS). The InSPIRES models integrate Responsible Research and Innovation, Open Science and Impact Evaluation as part of their DNA in order to open the research process up in a more strategic way to civil society and other stakeholders. The inputs from systematic impact evaluation studies will be continuously integrated in order to make InSPIRES SS 2.0 models more accurate and responsive to civil society needs and concerns. Concentrating most of its efforts on Research & Innovation in the health sector, with a strong focus on the environmental and social determinants, and giving special attention to gender parity and vulnerable groups (women, the elderly, adolescents, migrants and refugees), InSPIRES brings Science Cafés and other public engagement initiatives into its models together with a “glocal” international focus, for more inclusive, context relevant and culturally adapted community-based participatory research and innovation. Building on a comprehensive communication plan, with a strong effort dedicated to the development and implementation of a sustainability strategy, InSPIRES outcomes will: a) give evidence and support political bodies and decision-makers, in order to propose changes in local, regional, national and international policies; b) nurture the debate about the place and role of society in science, encouraging the systematic and ethical involvement of civil society actors and their societal concerns in the research and innovation processes, and c) support the development of new Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Open Science (OSc) strategies and guidelines, in the context of safe spaces to involve and engage civil society in the whole science process.

We are proposing ERNs for 2016 and 2017 in 12 French cities. Our consortium of 11 partners will organise afternoons for schoolchildren, events in the cities and, above all, evenings where 1000 researchers will meet up to 30,000 people a year. The general public will be able to meet a number of researchers directly and experience something memorable with them. Since 2006, we have acquired a solid knowhow in the “art of interaction”. In 2014-2015, we went one step further by including the public in the actual research experiments, thereby creating scientist-citizen cooperation. We will renew these experiences and go even further: we are encouraging the public and researchers to experience creative moments together! Several creative interactions will be set up, around the “Ideas” theme in 2016 and the “Impossible?” theme in 2017, to allow researchers and the public to interact. The evenings will be full of ideas, challenges, and encounters with diverse individuals. In this way, we will rally European researchers to get involved in each city. Specific strategies will be used (such as public radio recordings) to allow them to share their European experience. These moments of cooperation will without a doubt reinforce the mutual appreciation between researchers and citizens. Our communication strategy (attracting specific audiences through networking, web, partnerships with youth-oriented press, etc.) will be based on the slogan: “General Creativity”. This slogan denotes the interactive nature of the evening and gives us a chance to talk about the richness of European research. To this effect, and for the first time, Cédric Villani, an inspiring and renowned researcher, has accepted to be the ERN’s patron. Lastly, we plan to renew the “Great Participatory Experiment” in 2017. In each city (and perhaps even Italy), the public will contribute to the same playful scientific experiment chosen in 2016 after a challenge involving all our research institutions.