The context for the Turku Intersectoral Excellence Scheme (TIES) was that the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) had traditionally offered three-year research grants which allowed early- and mid-career academics to carry out their self-designed interdisciplinary (ID) research projects. While this had proved to be successful, by 2021 TIAS wished to both further internationalise and to engage in more intersectoral working with organisations outside of higher education. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action COFUND programme provided an ideal opportunity via which to achieve these aspirations. We wished to design a programme which could meet the calls that have been at regional, national and EU-level for more ID and intersectoral activity (e.g. in Finland: Finnish National Roadmap for Research, Development and Innovation 2020). We also wished to move the focus of intersectoral research programmes away from the STEM subjects to the SHAPE research areas. We were aware that the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) model provides one of the few frameworks for “blue skies” interdisciplinary academic research open to non-STEM fields. By integrating a new, intersectoral, element to this model we hoped to develop advance a new model for the IAS concept itself that: (i) broadened the horizons and participant-base of ID research; (ii) developed international thought leaders and (iii) promoted the translation of research into economic value. To achieve this, we supplemented the existing IAS model with a secondment programme. Here the location of secondments within TIES marked a significant departure for an IAS. It distinguished TIES from other IAS programmes by incorporating a secondment outside of higher education as a key part of the research. In short, we wanted to be more international, more interdisciplinary and more intersectoral – and TIES became the means of achieving these aims.
An important context is that TIAS works across five faculties within the University of Turku: Economics, Education, Humanities, Law and Social Sciences. It seeks to integrate the work of these faculties and facilitate ID research working. TIES has provided more opportunities for doing this via the recruitment of eight Experienced Researchers (ERs) from wider cultural backgrounds and with more diverse research interests than traditional TIAS cohorts.
TIES was also specifically designed to meet a number of demands from a range of policy bodies including:
• The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture’s National Roadmap for Research, Development and Innovation as it promotes intersectoral working, aims to attract international talent and to help to solidify a fragmented research sector.
• The EU’s Innovation Union flagship which aims to increase competitiveness, provide jobs and stimulate growth.
While it is too early to say whether this have been achieved, it is noteworthy that the secondments are already engendering different worldviews within the TIES ERs with the potential to contribute significantly to the above objectives.
