Eighteen universities will have access to €1m each over four years to develop partnerships with institutions from 29 countries, as part of DAAD’s new approach to enhancing cross-border cooperation in German higher education.

“We wanted to give universities more freedom to do big projects”

“We wanted to give universities more freedom to do big projects that they need to do but for it to be very flexible,” Karin Heistermann, head of internationalisation of studies and lecturing at DAAD, told the The PIE News. “Every university has a different strategy and a different approach to internationalisation.”

DAAD received 117 statements of interest after issuing a call for proposals, with 21 confirmed for the first year. The programme’s title, “Strategic Partnerships and Thematic Networks”, elicits the two types of projects to be funded . The strategic partnerships include more integral partnerships with one overseas institution while thematic networks involve a greater number of players.

Those selected show clear relevance to the universities’ internationalisation strategy, often building on existing partnerships. Projects include a research collaboration between the University of Mainz, Tohoku University in Japan, Stanford University in the US and external partner IBM Research. Another is between the University of Hannover and Staatliche Polytechnische Universität, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

According to Heistermann, the programme’s core aim is to encourage deeper partnerships. “We saw a trend of universities having deeper partnerships with fewer universities and we wanted to help them do that. Instead of implementing it bottom up we wanted to help them do it from the top down. A big part of that was often having strategic partnerships that they could focus on with a few universities rather than just building up more and more loose partnerships,” she said.

The programme’s original aim was to encourage less partnerships but more integration

A total of €250,000 will be allocated per project per year for up to four years, with the option to apply for additional project completion funding. Heistermann says there is the possibility for similar programmes in the future depending on the outcome.

“We’re going to see where this goes, we’ll analyse how it develops and the outcome. In the future there might be similar programmes but with a more original approach, for example we’ve talked about doing a German/China partnership.”