Newsletter September 2021
Time to Say Goodbye
At the time, I was looking for a job outside academia and I worried that my doctoral degree in English Literature qualified me for precious little else. What fascinated me about Euresearch was its in-between position. It was close to research but concerned with funding. It was largely funded by the federal administration, yet operating as an independent association. The Network was rooted in Switzerland but thoroughly oriented towards Europe. And although I was leaving academia, it was not a dead-end. All my previous experience as a post-doc, an expat and a university teacher were not only nice to have but actually a pre-requisite for becoming a new kind of expert, of whom there were few and far between. Even my apprenticeship at a bank many years before served me well, when I was asked to become the NCP for the legal and financial issues soon after I got the job.
After barely 6 years of existence, Euresearch at the time was still in its infancy and a different organisation than it is now. The then "Head Office" had a good dozen employees, the Network as a whole around 40. The NCPs were still all-rounders, with one person also being responsible for IT, another for our database, and a third for communication. There was no model for what we did in terms of content as well as with regard to our structure, at least not in Switzerland, and much of it often had an experimental character.
I was fascinated by this niche, which was sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse: a blessing because of the freedom we had to try things out, a curse when our raison d'être was questioned every once in a while by other organisations in the Swiss research and innovation landscape.
In the past 14 years, I've seen Euresearch grow up—which is also, mostly, a blessing and, occasionally, still a curse. The now "Network Office" has doubled its headcount, the Network as a whole nearly tripled. Over the years, we have professionalised our structure and our services, and I dare say we now have a firm place in the Swiss Research and Innovation landscape. At the same time, we are not as agile as we used to be. Knowledge transfer and communication management have become even more challenging than they were, given the constant growth of the organisation.
That's why I wonder what I'll miss more, now that I'm about to leave my position as Director of Euresearch: the improvised tune of the early years or the steady hum of the engine I helped polish over the years. But miss it I will.
Regina Schneider, Director
