Our fundamental purpose is to promote the European way of life, value-based, secure, resilient, inclusive and sustainable, fostering seamless integration of academia and society in collaborative regional and inter-regional ecosystems that will enable our universities to serve their stakeholdercommunities better and fully in line with our strong third mission profile, respecting academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
We want to further develop and share our unique Q-HELIX approach to ecosystem building that is based on the practical profile of our partners and their longstanding interwovenness with society.
We will promote university-industry-government-public-environment interactions, within the knowledge based economy and society in the respective eco-systems of the partner regions. We aim at increasing opportunities for people by implementing innovations that address sustainable development, including climate change, following interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches.
Realising our purpose will require the involvement of a great variety of actors from our institutions and surrounding ecosystems, be they students, teachers, researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations or public authorities. Realising our purpose, also requires a long-term strategy, shared objectives, realistic formats, plans and structures, strong and sustainable enough to orchestrate such huge transformations.
We have therefore decided to create a European University after an idea of French President Emmanuel Macron, brought forward at the November 2017 Gothenburg Social Summit of EU Heads of State and Government and subsequently endorsed by the December 2017 EU Council in Brussels, chaired by then Council President Donald Tusk.
Network-of-networks
Q-Helix will follow a ‘network-of-networks’ approach to leverage our relatively modest resources. We will combine our practical competencies, partner capacities and resources with experiences gathered through the local and global networks of our teachers, researchers and innovators, pooling and sharing through dynamic interaction. Our alliance will involve students to foster their organisational competences and test their capacities as eco-system influencers.
Security
The world is entering a new era of uncertainties, threats, risks and challenges. Security issues have moved centre stage again. Health and climate issues are compounded by armed conflict. One of our partners is located in the divided city of Mitrovica in Kosovo, two partners in Ukraine (Dnipro and Kiev) and our Lithuania partner is a Belarusian university in exile, hosting Byelorussian, Ukrainian and Russian refugee students and staff.
Our leadership has therefore decided to make security a priority in both managerial and societal sense by creating a dedicated task team with the mandate to assist alliance partners in building eco-systems that are resilient against threats, risks, natural hazards, cyber military and other.
Testing the Q-HELIX approach to eco-system building
We will test the Q-HELIX approach to cross-regional eco-system building in four inter-disciplinary fields
where partners have demonstrated their complementary strengths and we will identify new fields for
the next planning phase, depending on evolving societal needs. The four initial fields are:
Our joint long-term strategy stretches a period of 12 years in three broad phases of development. In that period, we will be:
Short-term ambition - Building the European University ecosystems (2024-2028)
The coming 4 years we will the European University and its ecosystems working together in five 5 domains of action (work packages) connected to 4 the inter-disciplinary fields (societal challenges) in which we will test the Q-HELIX approach to eco-system building.
Task teams have been created to start realising, as from spring 2024, sets of task-specific objectives and targets in a work package context. They will map, specify, pilot and scale activities & outputs underpinned by eco-system needs analyses and forecasts. The teams are purposefully composed of partner experts, students and relevant eco-system actors to ensure realism in the work and uptake of the findings.
Medium-term ambition - Expanding the European University ecosystems (2029-2032)
In the second phase, we will scale our activities even further and seek to replicate our approach beyond our 11 regional ecosystems. We believe that other regions in Europe and the world could benefit from the approaches that we will test and develop and that we can learn from them. In concrete terms we will conclude partnerships agreements with other quintuple helix ecosystems, using our worldwide academic networks as a starting point.
Long-term ambition - Consolidating and renewing the European University ecosystems (2033-2036)
In the third phase, our alliance should be able to consolidate its position as an influential player in the European and global higher education landscape. We have asked our impact expert team to work out scenarios to inform the debate on measures aimed at consolidation and renewal and what measures to take to ensure that doors and minds remain open.
To make our ambitious agenda succeed we have set out action plans in five domains of action. The
five domains of action are:
Our European University is an Alliance of 11 partner-universities from 10 different countries, of which two associated partners from Ukraine.
Q-Helix Joint Mission Statement was unanimously approved by Q-Helix members on 30th January 2024.
Members of the alliance have caused this Joint Mission Statement to be duly signed by the undersigned authorised representatives in separate signature pages.