FARIA Stakeholder Dialogues Day

FARIA Stakeholder Dialogues:

Get Involved! Finnish-US RDI Relations 2024+

Would you like to influence the future of Finnish-American RDI cooperation? We are inviting you to a day of sharing thoughts and ideas on what we can and should do to further develop and promote the work and interaction between Finnish and American higher education institutions. The FARIA Stakeholder Dialogues day aims to gather a group from the FARIA community eager to discuss and share ideas on future work.

As we want to create an informal and productive environment for this day, we have a limited number of spaces (20) available for this event. If you are interested in participating and have the opportunity to be present on 19th September, sign up here.

Program:

10.00-10.15: Welcome and agenda

10.15-11.15: Context of Finnish-US RDI Collaboration

This session provides an introduction to Finnish-U.S. Science Diplomacy and RDI collaboration. We’ll look at the political level and Team Finland activities in the U.S., the role of FARIA, and individual university cases. These perspectives serve jointly as contextualization for today’s workshops and discussions.

11.15-11.30: Coffee break

11.30-12.30: Needs and gaps: mapping of different stakeholder groups

Many different stakeholder groups are involved in Finnish-American RDI collaboration – academics, service staff, policy makers etc. These groups have their own demands and requirements, and meet various challenges when trying to utilize opportunities the best way or to develop sustainable collaborations. In this session we identify perceived needs and gaps, give pointers towards potential solutions and/or ways to address these potential shortcomings. The input from this session will be made use of in FARIA’s continued work, in the network’s advocacy and strategy plans and in reporting to ministries and other interest groups.

12.30-13.45 Lunch (courtesy of FARIA)

13.45-14.45: Representing Finland stronger together – Ideation for joint activities and organization

In theory it is simple – the closer Finnish institutions collaborate to represent in Finland in the U.S., the easier it is to create the necessary scale for visibility, which again benefits individual university actions. In practice, creating buy-in and alignment across institutions poses challenges. In this session we brainstorm ideas for joint activities which ideally make their way into the FARIA Action Plan 2024 and look for organization support. Results will feed also into our reporting to ministries and other interest groups.

14.45-15.00: Break

15.00-16.00: FARIA Network Meeting 2/2023 (hybrid)

Each year FARIA organizes two network meetings online, where we inform about the status of the network development, upcoming activities, and updates from the U.S. The participants of the FARIA Stakeholder Dialogue Day are invited to join in person, the rest of the FARIA community are welcome to join the meeting online.

Optional evening program:

16.30-17.30: Afterwork “network & mingle”

In a relaxed atmosphere we serve drinks and snacks.

Venue: TBC

18.00-20.00 Dinner (courtesy of FARIA)

Venue: TBC

Purpose of the Stakeholder Dialogue:

The environment for Finnish-US relations is changing rapidly, not only when it comes to RDI. While Finnish-US engagement becomes increasingly strategic and gains momentum more discourse is needed regarding future priorities, potential areas of strengths and modes of multi-level and multi-stakeholder collaboration.

Goal of the stakeholder dialogue is:

1. to inform about and contextualize current developments in Finnish-US RDI collaboration
2. to receive stakeholder feedback for FARIA operations & activities
3. to attract potential “FARIA Envoys” who are interested to occasionally co-develop and promote future activities to grow Finnish-American RDI engagement across Finland and the U.S.

Who we are looking to attend:

We are looking for colleagues from academia and university services (i.e. research support, innovation, international) who are interested to actively improve the environment for cross-institutional Finnish-American research and innovation collaboration by supporting one or more of the following examples (not extensive list):

• Serving as volunteer focus and advisory group for FARIA operations
• Involving their institutions in collaborative efforts
• Organizing webinars/seminars
• Advocacy work
• Networking and promotion
• Involving different university communities in the work (different disciplines, admin, academic etc.)