Tenacity project

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Meet the team: Andrea Marconi, University of Camerino

Andrea Marconi_UNICAM_res

Andrea Marconi who works for the University of Camerino and is Project Manager of the Tenacity project

University of Camerino (UNICAM) is a ‘city campus university’ chartered in 1336, with about 600 staff, about 8,000 undergraduate students, and 180 PhD candidates, of which about 40% are international students. High quality of student services and excellence in education and research are the main strategies of the University of Camerino. UNICAM is the first university in Italy to introduce quality control procedures in its institutional activities. It is holder of quality control certification of ISO 9001:2000 for all university activities and services such as tutoring services, placement, cultural and sporting activities. The University of Camerino has adopted the European Charter for Researchers and a Code of Conduct for their Recruitment. UNICAM is national contact point for the Italian Euraxess portal for the mobility of researchers and one of the four Italian Universities to obtain the prestigious European acknowledgement “HR excellence in research”. Knowledge Transfer is one of the core activities of the University of Camerino. In 2005, UNICAM established the International & Industrial Liaison Office (IILO), for promoting the value of research foreground, opening innovative links between industry and the academic world, with focus on small and medium sized enterprises and care for protection and management of intellectual property rights. Since 2007, UNICAM has convened the local start up competition, for scouting innovation and supporting young researchers in the creation of start up companies from labs and research. Currently, UNICAM has 15 active research spin-off companies. The Research and Technology Transfer sector, established in 2013, supports research groups in the management of national and international Research and innovation funded projects supporting the dissemination, the defense (protection of intellectual property, patenting and licensing) and exploitation of research results.

The University of Camerino has always gave a great attention to the cooperation with businesses and the territory, with the aim of promoting the development of the local territorial system, supporting the participation of young people, adults and the elderly in the process of building ideas social, economic and cultural innovation. UNICAM is highly committed in fostering participatory practices for the development of ideas and consequent sustainable projects that respect the context in which it is rooted. Coherently with this vision, the University prioritizes the combination between the academic environment, socio-economic needs and their imperatives that represent an increasing need to produce, transfer, and exploit viable research findings and new curricula addressing future skills need. We are aware that it is time to rethink and adjust HEIs’ role within the local and regional contexts they belong to. In line with the growing need to develop a knowledge-based economy and society, UNICAM, with the cooperation of the whole TENACITY Consortium, promoted the project for developing new strategies for civic commitment and public engagement. Universities must be sensitized and responsive to societal pressures, democratization of science and inclusion need to be part of the processes in addressing new curricula, non-formal and informal learning practices, and research trajectories.
Although the University of Camerino already promotes the exchange and comparison between the scientific community and the local community, through specific permanent working tables with the aim of defining and sharing common objectives to be achieved through transfer actions of technologies, skills and knowledge, through TENACITY project we would like to make a further step. We would like to responds to the need of a careful plan for the mission of civic engagement to maximize the benefits, which this brings to the cooperation between universities and society. We want to foster the development of universities’ social engagement dimension unlocking and mobilizing university resources and capacities to society and enterprises needs at regional and local level. The project is creating tools and strategies to promote skills and competencies for the empowerment of the academic community, local citizens and decision makers in developing deliberations through a structured and inclusive reasoned-giving approach.
From my perspective, the most interesting part of the project is the co-creation process ongoing with relevant European Partners for building together a shared and common definition of the third mission aiming at a greater democratization of science. The deliberative arenas on which we are working are real open spaces where actors belonging to the Universities and the local areas will be able to dialogue and implement real deliberative processes on relevant issues.
The University of Camerino aims to use the TENACITY Handbook, within the context of Third Mission policies, to train technical-administrative and teaching staff on the structuring of open public debates on the issues addressed by research and study courses of the university itself. As regards the ADA, UNICAM plans to make arenas available for research groups in order to improve the quality of project proposals for regional, national and European calls. The main objective will be to involve citizens, businesses and policy makers in the ADAs in order to draw research results as close as possible to the civil society’s needs.