As aUPaEU enters its fourth year, the project is taking stock of what has been learned so far - not only within our own consortium, but also through close collaboration with our sister projects, CATALISI and Accelerate Future HEI.
Together, the three Horizon Europe WIDERA projects have developed a joint policy brief on the challenges and enablers of institutional transformation in Higher Education Institutions through acceleration services.
The brief arrives at an important moment and brings together different but complementary perspectives. CATALISI has reached the end of its three-year journey, Accelerate Future HEI has moved into the final year of its four-year project, and aUPaEU continues its five-year work supporting European University alliances through shared digital infrastructure (the Agora platform).
A shared evidence base for transformation
The policy brief brings together evidence from three projects that have worked with Higher Education Institutions and alliances across Europe to test acceleration services in real institutional settings.
Across the three projects, almost 3,000 stakeholders have taken part in activities supporting institutional transformation. These include university leaders, research managers, academics, students, public authorities, industry representatives, and civil society actors. The stakeholder mapping included in the brief shows broad geographical engagement across widening and non-widening countries, as well as countries outside the EU.
This confirms one of the brief’s central messages: institutional transformation is not only an internal university process. It depends on ecosystems, partnerships, leadership, and the ability to connect institutional change with wider European Research Area priorities.
What acceleration services are helping HEIs achieve
The brief identifies several common achievements across CATALISI, Accelerate Future HEI, and aUPaEU.
Acceleration services have helped institutions co-design and test new approaches to transformation. These include Living Labs, mutual learning workshops, twinning exchanges, Communities of Practice, transformation pathways, self-assessment tools, monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and digital infrastructures such as the Agora platform and the CATALISI Catalyst Hub.
The projects have also strengthened awareness of key ERA priorities, including Open Science, research assessment reform, research careers, talent circulation, knowledge valorisation, digital transformation, and external engagement.
For aUPaEU, these findings strongly connect with the work carried out through Agora and its acceleration services. The brief recognises aUPaEU’s development of Agoras for university alliances and the co-creation of acceleration services to facilitate research, innovation, inter-institutional collaboration as outputs with wider relevance for ERA-aligned institutional transformation.
Four methodological lessons stand out
The joint policy brief highlights several lessons on how transformation can be supported effectively.
First, co-creation and peer learning matter. Transformation is more likely to take root when institutions are actively involved in defining their own priorities, testing solutions, and learning from peers. Top-down approaches alone are not enough.
Second, piloting in real institutional contexts is essential. Acceleration services need to be tested, adapted, and refined within the specific governance structures, cultures, and capacities of each institution.
Third, ecosystem engagement must be more strategic. Universities cannot transform in isolation, but not every stakeholder is equally relevant to every transformation process. The brief calls for more targeted engagement strategies that connect HEIs with the right public, private, academic, and civil society actors.
Fourth, monitoring and evaluation must be built in earlier. Common indicators, feedback mechanisms, and impact-tracking tools are needed to understand whether transformation activities are producing meaningful and lasting change.
Persistent barriers to institutional transformation
The brief also identifies systemic challenges that continue to slow down progress.
One of the most important is the lack of a shared definition and operational framework for acceleration services. Across different contexts, acceleration services may be understood as tools, methodologies, infrastructures, or support processes. This flexibility is useful, but it also makes it harder to compare results, scale successful approaches, and embed them beyond project lifecycles.
Leadership commitment is another decisive factor. Transformation progresses more effectively when senior leaders provide visible support and when mid-level actors, including research managers and institutional champions, are empowered to drive implementation.
The brief also points to institutional silos, limited coordination, cultural inertia, fragmented digital infrastructures, weakly institutionalised stakeholder engagement, limited national policy support, and insufficient M&E capacity.
A crosscutting message is the need for greater focus. Broad transformation agendas can dilute impact. Institutions may achieve deeper and more measurable progress by prioritising a smaller number of high-impact areas, such as Open Science, research assessment, talent circulation, stakeholder engagement, digital transformation, or knowledge valorisation.
Recommendations for the next phase of ERA-aligned transformation
The policy brief sets out recommendations at European, national, and institutional levels.
At EU level, it calls for a clearer operational framework for acceleration services, including common definitions, typologies, objectives, and impact indicators. It also recommends follow-up schemes for tested services, open M&E templates, and stronger support for shared digital infrastructures.
At national level, the brief highlights the need for predictable funding, policy alignment, capacity-building support, and national guidance to help HEIs scale tested transformation approaches.
At institutional level, HEIs are encouraged to embed acceleration services into long-term strategies, create transformation steering structures, recognise engagement and innovation work in career progression, and develop sustainability and ownership plans.
For aUPaEU, these recommendations are highly relevant as the project has entered its second half. The task ahead is not only to complete project activities, but to continue testing what has been developed, consolidate it, capture what works, and university alliances in embedding Agora in their standard process, allowing transformation to seep at the level of the partner universities and last beyond the project’s lifetime.
From project learning to lasting impact
The joint policy brief shows that acceleration services can play an important role in helping HEIs become more entrepreneurial, innovative, open, and connected. But it also makes clear that long-term transformation requires more than project-based activity.
It requires leadership, institutional ownership, focused priorities, sustainable funding, effective monitoring, and stronger links between universities and their ecosystems.
The lessons emerging from CATALISI, aUPaEU, and Accelerate Future HEI offer practical evidence for future European support to Higher Education Institutions - and a clear message for policy and practice: transformation is most effective when it is co-created, tested, measured, and embedded for the long term.
Read the full policy brief here