IMPRESS-U: Resilient Engineering to Advance Public Value and Innovation in Research Periphery Countries
The project examines how schools of engineering in Research Periphery Countries (RPC) transform their research, teaching, and institutional practices during times of crisis. Higher education institutions under RPCs operate in constrained conditions shaped by limited funding, institutional pressures, and policy challenges. Armed conflict, geopolitical instability, and other crises raise these challenges to extraordinary levels, affecting their ability to sustain engineering research and deliver innovations that serve society.
The project is grounded in crisis science, which conceptualizes crisis as a “refocusing event” that stimulates paradigm shifts, alters methodological approaches, and reorganizes institutional priorities. In this context, the study investigates “crisis engineering”: how engineering education and research adapt to severe disruptions while maintaining academic standards and responding to public needs, resilience, and social impact.
Using a comparative case study approach, the research focuses on engineering ecosystems in five RPC countries: Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. The aim is to identify the institutional, political, structural, and cultural factors that hinder or enable organizational and pedagogical innovations in engineering. The analysis will include aspirational strategies, implemented initiatives, and cases where transformations have not succeeded or have not met expectations. The outcome will be a typology of engineering transformations, highlighting barriers, enabling conditions, and their relevance to resilience and public value.
The core research questions address: how policymakers and university leaders perceive public value opportunities in engineering; what structural and workforce limitations affect innovation capacity; which engineering innovations have the potential to advance resilience; and how crisis conditions shape decision making and societal priorities. The study considers both organizational and cultural transformations (such as incentive systems, institutional structures, interdisciplinarity) and pedagogical transformations (including co-production-based learning and curriculum changes).
The two-year work plan consists of six main activities: country-specific literature review and team seminars; case selection and interview protocol development; data collection; coding and typology development; preparation of publications; and final workshops. The project will involve an interdisciplinary research consortium with regular meetings and the engagement of early career researchers. Data collection will rely on semi-structured interviews and the analysis of policy and strategic documents, allowing for a contextualized understanding of transformation dynamics.
Through systematic comparison across diverse RPC ecosystems, the project will provide empirical insights into how engineering programs respond to crisis and how transformations support resilience, innovation, and societal value. The results will have theoretical significance and practical implications, particularly for Ukrainian higher education, which must sustain operations amid war, and for other RPCs that have navigated major political, economic, and cultural transitions since independence. The project also emphasizes long-term international partnerships, knowledge transfer, and the creation of a collaborative research platform that supports future development and crisis-responsive engineering education.
