Brussels has a lot of university liaison offices representing universities from all over Europe. They do a tremendous work – I have seen it with my own eyes.

Some universities decide to gather into a collaboration around their Brussels activities. I have an old contact that is representing exactly such an initiative in Brussels. Simona Costa is Head of Office of the university collaboration Tour4EU. It is a collaboration of seven Tuscan universities where they have decided to join forces with a spearhead office in Brussels.

Of course I needed to invite in Simona for a talk about how that works. Seven universities are a big mouthful to represent so we discuss of course how they have organized their approach.It became a long talk, so this one is a two-episode release.

In the first part we talk about the background for the collaboration, we dig into the key functions of the office and how they are organized and finally we have a talk about the issue of distance between the liaison office and the region back home in Italy.

In the second half we zoom in on the way Simona is structuring the lobbying activities for the seven universities in Tour4EU and then we have a talk about how she secures access to proposals and projects for the Tuscan research communities she supports.Great content for research support professionals and Brussels-representatives.

A really strong episode.

Time codes #66:

00:06:30 Fly in

00:14:55 Functions and organisation

00:22:19 The connection home

Time codes #67:

00:02:25 Lobbying

00:26:10 Project facilitation

00:41:00 The toughest challenge