Time to load the flagships
One of the challenges we are facing in our department is what kind of cargo to load onto our four new flagships. It is important that the flagship concept is supported by new initiatives that make the flagships visible, both to the world outside and within our own organisation.
’The ship is loaded with ...’ is an old party game that many will perhaps remember from their childhood. One of the challenges we are facing in the department is to establish what our four new flagships should be loaded with.
It is, of course, not as if the flagships are sailing completely without cargo – they have been selected as flagships precisely because they represent areas where AGRO has strong expertise. However, it’s important that this is underpinned by new initiatives that make the flagships visible both to the outside world and internally in our organisation.
As previously discussed here in Biweekly, the flagship ‘Sustainable Pest Management’ held a brainstorming session in Flakkebjerg on 1 March 2016, which was well attended by people from both Flakkebjerg and Foulum. The meeting produced lots of ideas and we must now continue our work on some of them. Which of these ideas we should concentrate on has not yet been finally decided, but I would like to contribute my thoughts here.
Projects across sections
New projects are a prerequisite for keeping a flagship afloat. On this point, it became clear at the meeting that there are some unexploited opportunities for expanding projects across the department, and thus hopefully increasing the likelihood of successful grant applications by making better use of our joint expertise.
An example of a joint effort is a project co-designed by the sections CROP and SOIL, which has just been submitted to the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation for funding and links soil robustness in terms of pesticide leaching to the prevention of pesticide resistance. Other possible areas of collaboration could be between CROP/PATENT and SYSTEM where, for example, life cycle analyses could be integrated with projects on crop protection.
Review articles
Our publications are mainly based on the spin-off results from the projects and so it will also be in the future, but many journals also welcome good review articles because they generate more citations.
Maybe it’s time to take a good bite of this cherry. More citations is something that both scientists and the department are interested in, and reviews are a good way of raising our profile. That would be a true win-win situation.
We need to offer more courses
Yet another area that was highlighted at the meeting was the need for a greater range of PhD courses. We currently offer only one PhD course in agroecology. This is clearly too little, so we need more initiatives here.
For the MSc courses the aim should be that our current 10-ETCS course on pests and their control is expanded to a 15-ECTS course in connection with the change to a semester structure.
Beyond that, the course probably needs a facelift with, for instance, making better use of the available information technologies, which could also reduce the number of lectures in Aarhus. This would mean that students at other universities would be able to follow the course, too.
Our course is an important part of the plant line in the Agroecology degree programme, but compared with the animal line it is not doing as well. We will in the near future need to investigate how we can attract more students to the plant line. Summer courses may be an option.
New flagship job opportunities and popular science articles
Flagships can also raise their profile in connection with future job advertisements where most positions will be attached to a flagship. A special initiative would be to advertise a tenure-track position within each of the flagships starting with Sustainable Pest Management.
The communication of science does not only take place via scientific articles but also via activities aimed at the end users of our knowledge and the rest of society. Popular science articles about interesting results based on our publications in scientific journals that can be linked to a flagship can help increase our exposure near and far. On this point we are already well under way, and our communications consultant Janne Hansen is working on a number of initiatives.
As you can see from the above, many things can be done to load the flagships. It is, however, important that there is full support for new initiatives, since nothing is more disheartening than firing up initiatives which are then left to fizzle out. The time ahead will show how ambitious we should be.