June 7th, 2024
Thanks again to all speakers and participants in our session “How the gap between science and policy could be bridged?” at this year’s Eu-SPRI Forum Annual Conference at University of Twente. Professor Sylvia Schwaag Serger from Lund University, who made her career in both worlds, talked about the skills (young) professionals in academia and policy need. She highlighted communicative capabilities for bridging the differences in the languages used in the academic and policy worlds and an ambition to learn from each other. This mutuality was also emphasized by Tatiana Fernández Sirena from the government of Catalonia, who reported about Catalonia’s experiences with embedded researchers. She underlined that public administration simply cannot change and adopt new competencies needed for policy-making in times of challenges and crises without “engaging” interactions.
As a group of researchers in the field of science, technology and innovation policy, we see a growing number of colleagues being motivated to produce policy-relevant results, and we notice increasing need from policy practitioners to interact with science in order to build up capacities for innovative policy-making in times of grand societal challenges and geopolitical crises. In our session, we discussed two demonstrators, how Eu-SPRI Forum as a network can support science-policy linkages in times of transformation. These demonstrators were developed in an exploratory initiative by a group of colleagues from Fraunhofer ISI (Stephanie Daimer and Liu Shi, coordinator), AIT (Matthias Weber, Lasse Bundgaard), Ingenio (Alejandra Boni and Diana Velasco) and LISIS (Mireille Matt, Renée van Dis) in close collaboration with policy practitioners from Eu-SPRI Forum’s Stakeholder Advisory Board (chaired by Philippe Larrue from OECD).
