Piloted at the University of Vaasa, the Expertise Exchange Platform proved to be a great tool to spark conversation and collect staff members’ ideas on how to retain international talent in the region.
The Expertise Exchange Platform, now at its piloting stage, is a tool for solving problems together, within and across institutions. Here’s one example on how the platform can be used to find new solutions to an existing challenge.
Challenge: how do we retain international talent in the Vaasa region?
In its strategy, the University of Vaasa has a strong focus on internationalisation. A growing number of international students and researchers arrive to Vaasa every year. Their expertise is needed in the Vaasa region that hosts the largest energy technology hub in the Nordic countries. At the same time, competition for talent is increasing not only in Finland but all over Europe. This is why the pilot campaign dealt with the very tangible problem of “How do we retain international talent in the Vaasa region?”.
Collaborating with local, regional and national stakeholders, the university has already established many actions for talent retention, coordinated by the university’s Talent Hub team. To gain new ideas for initiatives that could be implemented in the university or in collaboration with other stakeholders in the region, the Talent Hub team wanted to engage with the university staff members. They were looking for a good way to collect ideas, but also make the issue a discussion. This is where the Expertise Exchange Platform comes in.
Solution: collecting ideas from staff through the Expertise Exchange Platform
The Expertise Exchange Platform platform, along with its idea collection features and community features allowed the entirety of the University of Vaasa staff to contribute to the campaign. These features allowed, among other things, anonymity when publishing ideas or comments. With an offline launch and then an online follow up, more than 30 ideas were published. Based on these ideas more than 30 discussions emerged, with a total of 75 comments. The campaign was first introduced at a staff event and then advertised on the intranet for three weeks and viewed by close to 75% of all staff, ensuring that everyone had an equal opportunity to access the campaign.
Through the use of the platform, these ideas were then shortlisted to be presented to the project team committee. From the shortlist, best ideas were selected to be investigated further for possible implementation. This process is handled off the platform.
Brief and set up
Defining and setting up the campaign in close co-operation with the Talent Hub team.
Launch
Introducing the campaign at a staff event.
Campaign open online (3 weeks)
Promoting the campaign through intranet.
Shortlisting ideas, awarding participants
Prizes for best ideas and active participation.
Implementation
Selected ideas are developed further off the platform.
Outcomes and benefits
Overall, this campaign’s outcomes were over 30 ideas, with 75 comments. The benefits of using the platform was that it allowed all members of staff to participate, either as themselves or anonymously in the discussion of how to retain talent in the university. They were able to submit ideas and comments to the campaign – ensuring an active discussion. This active discussion also helped guide the decision makers in the ideas selection to make sure that only the best ideas would be implemented.
The key resources beyond the platform that need to be highlighted is an excellent “on the ground” team that helped in the decision making and marketing of the campaign at the University of Vaasa, as well as directing the purpose of the campaign. The team also helped in the campaign creation process, ensuring that everything would address their problem specifically. The project team contributed by participating in the set up of the campaign, and actively guided the creation of the submission form. Additionally, the project team helped write the marketing and campaign texts to ensure that they were up to standard.
Piloting of the Expertise Exchange Platform continues
This is a great use case of using the platform to collect and discuss ideas in a university specific context. In terms of the piloting of the platform in the overall REUNICE context, there are several other use cases including but not limited to: student facing campaigns, collaborative campaigns with industrial players, or campaigns focused on a specific user group. We work hard to bring these additional campaigns to life.
We hope that this example can help inspire you run your own campaigns in your institutions! If you’re interested, feel free to get in touch with Riccardo Notarangelo, riccardo.notarangelo@uwasa.fi.
The Expertise Exchange Platform has been developed within the REUNICE Project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 101035813
