Two years of Horizons: Developing and adapting through collaboration
With the Horizons Institute looking forward to its third year, our director Stuart Taberner shares his reflections on what has worked well, how we’re working increasingly closely with our colleagues in Research and Innovation Service, and how we’re developing our approach based on feedback from our community.
The Horizons Institute is two!
Like most toddlers the Horizons Institute is learning fast — though sometimes still stumbling, we’re now (fairly) steady on our feet and looking for new adventures, and new challenges.
What have we learnt over the last two years, as we’ve started out on our mission to work with colleagues from across the campus to develop novel research ideas, and even new ways of thinking about research itself?
That the University is a complex and often daunting place, even for those of us that have been here for a long (long) time. Colleagues can struggle to navigate the support that is on offer to help them to think and develop big ideas with people beyond their own schools and departments.
That it takes a long time and lots of structured support for big ideas to be seeded, to grow, and to flower. There is a balance to be struck between a hothousing approach to promote the initial germination of an idea, and the more patient nurturing that is required for it to become fully formed.
In our first two years, we’ve had to take on board these two key points — the opacity of the University, and the balance between short-term, intensive interventions and more sustained support — as we’ve launched new cross-campus Challenge Networks on Reimagining Ageing, Time, Biospheres, and Remaking Places; intensified collaborations between Leeds academics and Global Academy fellows in Pretoria, Wits University, and the University of Ghana; worked with Leeds City Council on their Areas of Research Interest (ARIs); launched new funded research projects with communities across the region and beyond, and much else besides.
Idealism and pragmatism: finding a balance
We’ve also had to think hard about how to balance the intentional idealism of the Horizon Institute’s guiding values with a pragmatic approach that gets things done in an institution — and indeed a higher education system — that frequently reinforces hierarchies and inequalities, or is often just very difficult to grasp.
Colleagues from across the University that we have worked with on these initiatives have told us how much they value the support we offer — to make new connections, to build confidence, to develop and scale-up their ideas — and they have asked us to be clearer about where we fit into the ‘eco-system’ of support across Leeds and to make sure that our different programmes deliver what is needed at the right time.
That’s why we are now rethinking how we talk about the Horizons Institute, how we work with other teams in research support, and how we design and implement our programmes. Trial and error — experimentation and learning — is a vital part of research, of course, and we want to incorporate that into our development as an Institute. We don’t want to do things just because we have always done them, and we want to be flexible and creative in response to what the people we work with ask of us.
We’re starting to work much more closely with other parts of the University’s Research and Innovation Service, therefore.
Seamless support across Research and Innovation Service
Concretely, this means talking to Rachel Curwen’s Research and Development (RID) team about the Horizons Institute’s role as an incubator for new and innovative ideas that the RID team can then pick up and channel towards funding opportunities. Horizons scanning will increasingly be a component of this joint work.
At the same time, we are forging closer connections with Martin Stowe’s Business Engagement and Enterprise team and with Sarah Hall’s knowledge exchange and impact team, including public engagement and policy.
The ambition for all of us is that the Research and Innovation Services ‘offer’ is much better articulated and communicated to colleagues across the University, and that it is seamless, simple to navigate, and effective.
On a very practical level, we want to be much clearer about exactly what kind of support is available at each point along the ‘research journey’ and we want to create a smoother transition from one team to another. If you become part of one of the Horizons Institute’s flagship Challenge Networks (this year’s selection process underway right now!) you can expect to be linked in at an early stage to members of other RIS teams who can help you to already be thinking about funding opportunities, impact, or even commercialisation.
Being responsive to feedback
On top of this, we’ve thought hard about how to respond to the comments that we’ve received over the last two years. More than a thousand colleagues have taken part in our programmes, ranging from a year of intensive support as members of our Challenge Networks, to taking part in the Global Academy, to attendance at our ‘What comes after the SDGs’ discussions with high-profile external speakers or our more internally-focussed ‘Insight Series’. The feedback is generally very positive but we know there is more that we can do.
One of our key areas of focus as we rethink our activities is our Challenge Networks programme.
In essence, this is an offer to colleagues from any part of the University to develop a novel research idea as a collaboration across the range of disciplines. What we are hoping for are innovative, high-risk ideas that can catch the imagination of people across the campus and draw them in for an intense period of intellectual exchange, potentially also with external partners, leading to the establishment of a sustainable network, or platform.
This approach was successful last year, with success in Anti-microbial Resistance (AMR), Physical Activity, and Mental Health, and is beginning to show very positive signs this year, with Reimagine Ageing, Time, Global Biosphere Sensing, and Remaking Places.
Developing our approach and offer
The changes we are planning to make to the Challenge Networks programme are far-reaching. Most significantly, we will be extending the period of support to eighteen months.
This means that we can spend more time on establishing the network — helping a leadership team to form and bond and paying greater attention to developing the research concept — and it means we can spend more time towards the end of our period of support on smoothing a network’s transition to self-sufficiency, including connecting to other forms of support in Research and Innovation Services.
In addition, however, we are also rethinking what kind of support we offer, and at which point in the evolution of a network. We are likely to take a more structured approach in the future, meaning that we set out options for how we can intervene at key points with — for example — brainstorming sandpits, more extended ‘crucible’ events to develop ideas and the interdisciplinary collaborations needed to pursue them, and dedicated sessions on communications, impact and dissemination, etc.
We know that everything we do wouldn’t be possible without the fantastic levels of engagement we’ve had from colleagues across campus, and beyond — so thank you to everyone who has taken part in our programmes so far. We hope that you will continue to participate in our programmes and to offer feedback — as we progress from our second to our third year, grow ever more adept, and keep learning!
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