Blog: ECMI represents a positive trend

In the German-Danish research collaboration one can track a new and positive trend. ECMI is one of the examples, according to blogger and Research Attaché Nikolaj Helm-Petersen.

“There seems to be a trend leading away from cooperation based on common short-term projects for Danish-German research collaboration, to cooperation that is also (soon) based on common research institutions.”

So writes Nikolaj Helm-Petersen, who blogs for the Danish Ministry of Research, Innovation and Higher Education. Helm-Petersen is a Research and Technology Attaché at the Innovation Centre Denmark in Munich. 

The problem with short-term projects, such as the ones funded by the EU Framework Programmes, lies precisely in that they are temporary. Cooperation tends to cease when the temporary coffers are empty.

Therefore, Helm-Petersen asks if the permanent research funds help to develop common research institutions. The permanent funds are national.

And this is indeed the case in the German-Danish borderland, explains Helm-Petersen, where both European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI), University of Southern Denmark, and the Interreg-funded ‘Knowledge Region’ appear as examples.

“Together, the various examples bear witness of Danish-German research collaborations that develop in the direction of more binding, more comprehensive and more long-term nature, and about researchers’ international cooperation patterns which are far from ‘just’ controlled by the current short-term programme funds,” writes Helm-Petersen.