A new academic year, a new newsletter. This is the first newsletter from our centre of expertise Public Impact: the research centre of campus Groenplaats. From now on, you can expect news from us in your mailbox twice a year, each time at the beginning of a new semester. Central to this newsletter is how you, as a teacher, can collaborate with our centre of expertise. This is important, both for us and for you, and especially for our students. In this newsletter for KdG lecturers, we go into how such a collaboration can look like.
What can we do for you?
There are several ways in which we can work together. Our centre of expertise offers a whole range of teaching and learning materials, all available via the research page of our website. If you are a lecturer in the study programme Event & Project Management (EPM), our knowledge database is an absolute must-have. After all, we are viewed as the centre of expertise for the event sector. Our EPM students will be able to graduate with a first movers’ advantage, thanks to our knowledge and expertise on impact measurement, sustainable events, crowd counting .... What an asset!
In addition to events, lecturers who want to make a strong commitment to sustainable entrepreneurship can also come to us. Especially those who want to integrate Corporate Social Responsibility (more), will appreciate our research output on sustainable mobility choices or inclusive organisations. At the end of October, we will be adding building blocks for inclusive recruitment and selection to our principles for managing philosophical diversity in SMEs. In that knowledge platform, you will also find building blocks on inclusive teamwork. More than 20 game variants can be integrated into your lessons. You will find tools and best practices, as well as research summaries you can download for free and use as teaching material, in Dutch and English.
Many of our researchers also work partly as lecturers. We teach several courses ourselves, as well as expert classes and guest lectures on our research output and research skills. We develop and supervise train-the-trainer programmes for lecturers for the Consultancy assignment in the study programme Organisation and Management. We also assist various student projects, both in the study programmes International Business Management and SME Management.
What can you do for us?
We want to expand our reach (at least within our campus Groenplaats) and allow them to benefit from our in-house expertise. Unfortunately, our capacity and thus time for education projects is limited. Therefore, we invest in a one-to-many approach, to inform lecturers about how our centre of expertise works. This way, we want to inspire them to use our research output in their lessons and activate them to cooperate more intensively with our researchers. In time, this will enable them to transfer our knowledge to their students themselves. But we need your help to discover how best to do that.
Of course, we would not be a centre of expertise if we did not take this opportunity to ask our lecturers some questions. What do you need to support your curriculum and students, and how do we best communicate this? What does your ideal collaboration with our centre of expertise look like? Let us know by answering a few short questions via this link (only in Dutch). Completing the survey only takes a few minutes. In our next newsletter, we will share the results of this survey and elaborate on how we can collaborate (more) in the future.
Who are we and what do we dream of?
The centre of expertise Public Impact was formed in 2018 to anchor the research group 'ROI for Public Events'. What began in 2014 with an initial PWO project to develop a model to measure the societal return on investment (ROI) of events, soon evolved in a research group in which follow-up research and business projects were carried out. The centre of expertise was born in the study programme Organisation and Management - and more specifically within Event & Project Management – and with strong links to the other study programmes within campus Groenplaats. Since 2016, the research team has included lecturer-researchers from these three programmes. Today, our expertise centre has 12 researchers, and counting.
We dream of:
vibrant cities, filled with events, tourist and cultural activities, shopping opportunities, terraces and entertainment options (fun cities);
authentic cities, where people live and work with respect for each other and our planet and where sustainable and inclusive entrepreneurship are self-evident (soft cities);
liveable cities, where people are paramount and where technology is primarily used to improve city life (smart cities).
As researchers, we want to make living, working and staying in urban social spaces as enjoyable as possible for residents, businesses and visitors alike. We aim for impactful events and encounters organised by sustainable and inclusive entrepreneurs in attractive cities and venues where everyone feels welcome, at home and safe. To this end, we conduct applied scientific (impact) research. By studying human behaviour, economic opportunities and social innovations, we can inspire, guide and provide organisations active in the various meeting sectors with knowledge, data and tools. We share our expertise not only with (future) professionals, but also with policymakers and the public. With our research, services, training, and scientific communication, we focus strongly on cross-pollinations and partnerships that complement and strengthen our expertise.
Contact
Are you sufficiently informed, inspired and activated to get started with our knowledge, data and tools in your lessons and student projects? Or would you still like brainstorm with us about a concrete idea to work together? Do you need advice on a particular project or a pressing research question from your field? Please contact us.
As centre of expertise, we are defined by the research we do. Research, driven by curiosity and eagerness to learn. Do you have something to tell us about the topics we work on, or can we learn something from you? This year too, you can find us every Monday in our office next to the View, on the second floor of campus Groenplaats. Feel free to drop in. You can make an appointment, but you don't have to. Our door is open to everyone.
Next steps
Want to read this newsletter again later? You can! We collect all our newsletters on this brand-new page for lecturers of our research website: the place where you can find all data, tools and information about our various impact studies for/about the (broad) event sector, safety and crowd management, sustainable entrepreneurship and inclusive organisations.
In February, you will receive our second newsletter. In it, we will tell you all about our new research programme and how we will position ourselves in the future. After all, there are a lot of changes coming up for the centres of expertise of KdG. Starting this academic year, for instance, we have for the first time our own Director of Research & Valorisation. An important milestone to put KdG out there as an important research organisation!