On 27 September ENLIGHT held its formal kick-off of the RISE project in a virtual format. The project officially started on 1 September. A festive launch event will be planned on 2 December at NUI Galway on occasion of the annual ENLIGHT General Meeting.
In the framework of the RISE project the ENLIGHT partners will develop a joint research and innovation agenda. By identifying common strengths, they will foster new groundbreaking, large-scale collaborative research projects. The overarching goal is to jointly serve our societal missions from an R&I perspective around the 5 ENLIGHT flagship areas.
In February 2021, the ENLIGHT partners announced the success of their funding application for a research and innovation component within ENLIGHT: the EU granted the network 2.4 million Euro for this purpose. ENLIGHT RISE (Research and Innovation agenda with and for SociEty) will support ENLIGHT in its R&I dimension, to deploy a comprehensive joint transformation agenda, in synergy with the educational component and in partnership with surrounding ecosystems.
The objective of ENLIGHT RISE is to become more competitive and innovative together, leveraging and synergizing our respective strengths and capitalizing on our innovation potential and partnerships with our surrounding ecosystems to jointly promote a greener, healthier, more equitable and sustainable Europe.
To reach these goals, ENLIGHT RISE will
- establish a longer term business model for joint R&I actions and set up a joint R&I support group with innovative digital tools to facilitate the submission of joint research proposals,
- identify strong research synergies and identify strategic scientific areas
- initiate pilot projects with high innovation potential through seed funding
- enable the sharing of and optimize capacity of digital research infrastructures, while benchmarking and optimizing the societal impact of digital innovation/artificial intelligence through a DI/AI network,
- reinforce cooperation and co-creation with the business sector and civil-society,
- mainstream and incentivize open science practices and public engagement,
- improve the attractiveness of researchers’ careers, and
- develop and formalize methods towards an impact-driven R&I agenda.
The construction of a European Innovation District will promote the collaboration between the academic and industrial sector in the regions of partner universities, while the Research and Innovation Observatory will bring the results and innovations from the projects into the public domain. From the start of the project, ENLIGHT RISE will also include a strong focus on early-career academics, setting up networking opportunities and an Early Career Academic Leadership Programme. Civil Society engagement tools and mentoring will be proposed, and the impact of our joint R&I agenda will be monitored throughout the project by an Impact Taskforce.
Read more about RISE on https://enlight-eu.org/index.php/landing-research-and-innovation/research-and-innovation