IMPRESS-U: Resilient Engineering to Advance Public Value and Innovation in Research Periphery Countries

The study examines how Higher Education (HEI) Institutions engineering departments transform while prioritizing resilience, public value and societal impact within the context of crisis in five Research Periphery Countries (RPC) countries: Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The multi-country investigation enables to identify critical barriers and support factors within the complex and varied HEI ecosystems.

There is a limited existing theoretical or empirical framework that characterizes the factors that enable academic engineering transformation in RPC-specific contexts during crisis. Ukrainian engineering programs have successfully sustained their teaching, learning, and research enterprises, despite over a decade of Russian aggression. The HEI systems of other project RPC nations have been operating under similar constraints and threats. Case studies within these contexts will enable the development of a novel typology of critical innovation factors associated with resilience, public value, and societal impact, in times of crisis, and exemplify actionable strategies that can be translated and adopted in/from Ukraine and other RPC countries.

The research addresses three specific scientific opportunities. The first opportunity is to characterize what “crisis engineering” entails in RPC countries. The political and economic volatility throughout the region requires a tailored approach to transformation of engineering schools. The second opportunity is to explore the linkage of how the threat and/or reality of crisis of war and other RPC-specific crises shape decision-making in HEIs within these countries. The third opportunity is to produce actionable research conclusions that may inform HEI engineering innovation across RPC countries and shared learning networks across the region.

Within the regional RPC context, a sample of research questions include:

(Ecosystem Context) How do policymakers, university leadership and other RPC HEI ecosystem stakeholders perceive the public value opportunities and requirements of engineering? What are HEI engineering’s strengths and limitations, especially structural, organizational and workforce development aspects that are critical to innovation and resilience? How does a state of crisis (war, economic, security threats, etc.) or anticipated crisis shape how public values are identified? What is the perceived relationship between crisis and engineering capacities?

(Ecosystem Supports) What HEI engineering innovations (organizational/pedagogical) have the potential to advance public value? How do they affect crisis resilience? What ecosystem factors contribute to the establishment and outcomes of these transformations? Which ones stand out as successes? What makes them successful? How is resilience, public value, and societal impact conceptualized in these innovations? How are these factors demonstrated in implementation?

(Ecosystem Barriers) Which transformations have not succeeded or not reached the envisioned potential? What dimensions of the RPC ecosystem hindered their success? How does contextual volatility, especially related to crises, create barriers for implementing engineering transformations?