Past Initiatives

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Best Practice in Leadership Development

Led by the University of Copenhagen, IARU HR directors and senior management responsible for leadership development formed a network to discuss challenges and share best practices concerning leadership development for leaders in academia. The network explored:

• Common leadership challenges facing IARU member Universities in challenging and changing/turbulent times - both at an institutional level and at a research group level
• Current best practices within leadership development e.g. use of Leadership Competency Frameworks, program designs, delivery models, etc.
• Future IARU initiative focusing on leadership development.

The network has been successfully formed and keep in touch on a regular basis.

Integrated Services

Broadly, Integrated Services: Benchmarking HR and Corporate Services involve transactional services across corporate functions moving under one line management structure over a period of time, resulting in efficiency savings through process and system improvements, multi-skilling of staff and economies of scale in administrative activities.

A key result from this initiative was an extensive benchmarking report on the areas of HR and Finance between five IARU institutions.

30 librarians, researchers and industry representatives met in 21 – 22 January 2010 to discuss the issue of Open Access / Open Cast Publishing. The motivation for the meeting arose from the need to discuss alternative ways of publishing (e.g. internet as a medium for content distribution) as well as creative solutions to address the increasingly rising costs for licenses in academic journals which in the long run will limit accessibility of the various academic journals by our university libraries.

Through the universities' career centres, students could benefit from more information to equip them for careers that are becoming increasingly global. Similarly, employers could also be assisted in their graduate recruitment across the world through inter-agency referrals. A meeting of career development professionals of these universities was held to discuss areas of collaboration so as to facilitate global career development and employment needs of students and employers. 

VP Research Meeting

Senior Research Heads of IARU universities met to discuss various issues related to the running of research-intensive universities.  Topics discussed included:

• Frameworks for collaboration - common problems and solutions, mechanisms to facilitate collaborative research, general understanding of constraints in each country/region – such as contract jurisdictions, intellectual property laws
• Mechanisms to manage and direct research to achieve university strategic objectives
• Crisis management - the role of universities in assisting government to respond to crises - eg avian influenza, earthquakes/tsunamis, wars/civil unrest in neighbouring countries