The “PhD Hub Starter” Online Workshop
The “PhD Hub Starter” was organised on the 29th of April with over 60 academic leaders, researchers and early-stage researchers in virtual attendance. The event focused on exploring the key success factors of high-impact business-driven research as well as discuss good practices towards structured cooperation in the field of research with Industry.
Several success stories and examples were showcased by the PhD Hub partners and EU stakeholders such as:
- “STEAMhouse“, from the Birmingham local PhD Hub, is the University Innovation Centre. It supports entrepreneurs, companies and sole traders to develop new products and services and contributes to driving innovation and research for long-term growth in the region. The STEAMhouse embeds the PhD Hub principles in its core activities and brings the PhD Hub Network forward.
- The “Doctoral School of Industry Innovations” (DSII), stemming from the close collaboration between Tampere University and New Factory in Finland, offers unique opportunities to early-stage researchers to undertake business-driven research and tackle real-world business challenges by conducting their doctoral research in joint collaboration settings with both Academia and Industry.
The PhD Hub platform: A solution to match multifaced research needs
The PhD Hub online platform is a key element to developing and mainstreaming the internationalisation of doctoral training in Europe. The platform has been designed to answer the converging needs of early-stage researchers, researchers and business representatives at local and international levels. We build on the 3iS, namely International, Inter-sectoral and Interdisciplinary and thus, provide a favourable environment to creating value-added, business-driven research results that can be used and contribute to the socio-economic growth of the region and Europe.
The innovative component of the PhD Hub lies in the fact that it connects the right research and innovation actors together on the phdhub.eu platform, therefore, enabling an appropriate, timely and relevant response to the unique challenges faced by the socio-economic actors.
The key features are:
- The innovative structure of cooperation which connects local innovation and research communities (a.k.a. the local PhD Hubs) to the rest of the world and which is inherent to the overall architecture of the PhD Hub web portal and the “Community” feature.
- The “PhD offers” which enables PhD Hub members to advertise and/or browse as well as apply to industrial PhD offers from all over Europe.
- The “Cooperation offers” which give the opportunity to public and private organisations, Universities and individual stakeholders to publish their research needs.
Looking towards the future of research and innovation in Europe
The PhD Hub network is composed of forward-looking Universities, industry representatives, researchers and early-stage researchers who believe that cross-border/sectoral cooperation, open science and the exchange of knowledge at local and international levels are the essence of EU’s innovation capacity and will, subsequently, become a condition sine qua non to ensuring that the knowledge-workers of tomorrow contribute to society in a meaningful manner.
If your Higher Education Institution is interested in joining the PhD Hub Network, contact us.