Priorities
Our vision for the University of Glasgow for the next strategic cycle:
By working in teams, building on each other’s ideas, and making Glasgow the best place to develop a career, our research transforms lives and changes the world.
To fulfil this vision, we will focus on three priorities.
- Collaboration: the importance of collaboration for addressing important challenges
- Creativity: the fundamental role of creativity in academia
- Careers: the need to recruit and support students and staff, at any stage, to develop skills and fulfil their career ambitions
These priorities have been shaped by developments in the sector, our consultations with schools and research institutes in 2019, and the feedback obtained from the 2019 survey on research culture.
Collaboration: working together to tackle bigger challenges
We will address urgent problems in our society and the biggest gaps in our knowledge by working together. The timeline from underpinning academic research to societal impact can take years or even decades.
We will make collaboration easy – across disciplines, institutions, industries, sectors, entrepreneurs and government. We will remove barriers, such as procedural or financial ones, and invest in the mechanisms, expertise and leadership needed both to initiate and sustain collaborations.
Successful partnerships depend on recognising the different, specialist contributions that are made to the research and innovation endeavours, and so we will reflect the importance of partnership in our investments.
We will create both physical and virtual spaces in which to collaborate and enable connectivity to enhance our reach, influence and profile.
Creativity: reaffirming the centrality of ideas
Great research starts with great ideas, but we also know that this creativity takes time and requires the right conditions. The quality of our research outputs and impact will continue to drive the reputation and careers of our researchers, and that rests crucially on the ideas that we develop.
We will support creativity by developing the opportunities in which new ideas can emerge. Our development programmes will focus on where ideas come from and how we foster them in others, and we’ll use new forms of engagement to open up different ways of thinking. We will therefore create the conditions in which ideas can be widely shared and improved, and so more likely to make a difference to knowledge and make a positive difference to society.
To give researchers the opportunity to think imaginatively about the future, we will ensure that they experience trust, flexibility and autonomy.
Careers: helping each other to succeed
Glasgow succeeds when its people succeed. We will make Glasgow the best place in which to pursue a career, whether at the University or in the city, by creating an environment in which colleagues are supported to fulfil their ambition, in which expectations are clear at every career stage, and in which measures of quality, progression and opportunity are easy to understand.
We will create an environment that recruits, supports and rewards a broad range of skills, talents, and contributions, and in which we support each other to succeed. We recognise that many who embark on a research career will ultimately take up other careers outside universities: these post-academic careers have an important impact, both economic and societal, that universities enable.
To increase visibility, we will reinforce the relationship between transparency and rigour in developing trust and thus reputation.
Research culture @UofG
At Glasgow, our positive research culture promotes a healthy research environment – in the way we evaluate, support and reward quality, how we recognise contributions to a research activity, how we support careers, and how we are building an environment in which individuals collaborate in an atmosphere of openness and trust.
Culture is the foundation of what we do. Therefore, our ambitions for culture are not described separately in this strategy but are embedded across the pillars of the strategy and its underlying actions. Our future work will build on the aligned series of policies and actions to enhance research culture that we began in 2015.
A Lab for Academic Culture
In 2020, we established a Lab for Academic Culture in order to consolidate our actions to support culture, to identify the shared priorities of research and teaching activities, and to coordinate these actions with the wider sector. Future actions to further our research culture, including support for careers, will be delivered by this lab.
Our research culture programme has received external recognition, including from the Royal Society, the UK Research Integrity Office and the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Action plan
Our 2020–2025 action plan for research culture details future actions to support career development, assess research quality and improve collaboration and visibility.
