European Excellence Initiative: Acceleration services in support of universities

The overall aim of the Higher Education Institutions acceleration services is to help institutions to make progress in institutional change in ERA priority areas, such as strengthening research careers, gender equality plans and reform of career and research assessment, mainstreaming of open science, institutional strategy development in R&I, etc. The acceleration services will support institutions in these efforts, by creating a shared knowledge base, coaching service and virtual meeting place to enable the connection with peers, as well by providing seed funding to users. The acceleration services should involve large user groups (either individual HEI, networks or alliances of universities and surrounding ecosystem actors, or umbrella organisations of HEI).

Projects should be aligned with assessment tools such as HEInnovate and HRS4R. Complementarity with existing similar tools, such as those funded under WIDERA 2021-2022 and EIT’s HEI Initiative[[www.eit-hei.eu; EIT HEI Initiative has been designed with the aim of increasing the innovation and entrepreneurial capacity in higher education by bringing together HEIs in innovation value chains and ecosystems across Europe.]] will be taken into account. Experts, tools and platforms generated by previous projects, such as those supported under Horizon 2020 Science with and for Society, should be taken into account.