Introduction
Since EUR adopted its Strategy 2024 ‘Creating Positive Societal Impact’, a lot has been done to strengthen the focus on realising societal impact in all our activities. The last few years we focussed on the changes needed for transforming to an impact driven university and to foster our impact potential by initiating many different initiatives. This report summarises some of our main achievements and illustrates them with a very diverse set of wonderful examples of impactful education, research and engagement. It shows that our motto – Making Minds Matter – is more than just a few words, it is a lived reality for us. And more and more we aim to be a really engaged university, strongly embedded within the wider Rotterdam region, while remaining closely connected to our peers and partners worldwide.
By fostering the development of impact-driven education, we enabled students to learn how to relate to the complexities of societal issues, to develop the necessary competencies for that and to reflect upon their own roles, values and perspectives when it comes to the multiplicity of such issues. We built a strong link with numerous societal partners to collaborate with in our education.
We invested a lot in enabling inter- and transdisciplinary research, mission-driven and impact-oriented research on a variety of complex societal challenges. We developed both within our organisation as well as within Convergence, LDE and UNIC, the necessary collaborations to deal with the multifaceted character of these challenges. We invested in the support for our researchers who want to make a difference. Our Erasmus Professors are flag bearers of our engaged research profile.
Over the last few years EUR also strengthened its focus on its societal engagement. We do see our engagement as one of our core tasks, besides (although, of course, strongly entwined with) our education and research. We started to organise our engagement in a much more focused and structured way. We invested in organising reciprocal and learning stakeholder networks within the wider Rotterdam region.
We also made important steps to align our operations with our impact ambition. For example, by giving more focus to impact and engagement within our human resources policies (“Recognition & Rewards”), by further professionalising our institutional support for engagement and impact-oriented research and by facilitating entrepreneurship and knowledge valorisation.
And yes, much must be done for example by creating a shared framework for impact and by aiming for more coherence between the many initiatives. But a lot of work has already been done, and much has been achieved. This report is published in the final months of the current strategic period. But the new strategy – in which still the core focus is on impact – is already in the making. That means that the lessons of this report also will find their way into our new plans and ambitions. For now, this report makes me extremely proud on what already is set into motion together with all our colleagues, students and partners!
Prof. Arwin van Buuren
Strategic Dean Impact & Engagement
Rotterdam, September 2024