When planning or updating funding programmes, we organise support from external stakeholders for you. Through our involvement in national and international initiatives and networks, we have a large pool of experts from research, industry and politics.
When restructuring or reorganising research and funding programmes, external stakeholders can help to rate the research topic as comprehensively as possible and can provide different points of view. Thanks to our involvement in many technological initiatives and roadmapping processes in Germany and abroad, our many years of methodological experience and the close contacts we maintain with representatives from research, industry, civil society organisations and politics, we can develop and organise customised stakeholder processes for you. Depending on the process and the need for advice, we can offer you different formats here, for example:
Strategy Dialogues
Participative and discursive techniques are used to identify topics, but can also be helpful for refining programme alignment. A limited number of participants from various disciplines (usually 10 to 20 people) are invited to facilitate intensive discussion. Embracing new moderation and creative techniques, contributions to the customer’s strategic development are discussed and recommendations for action are derived in these strategy dialogues.
Workshop Meetings
Workshop meetings provide an opportunity to share experience from ongoing or completed funding projects using best practice examples, and, building on this, to discuss further need for research and development. Thanks to highly efficient settings, we use the workshop meetings as incubators for new ideas and outlining conceptual prototypes.
Pooled Expert Knowledge Meets Diversity
Interactive stakeholder and participation formats can be held as half-day, full-day or even multi-day standalone events, and also as side events at conferences, trade fairs or congresses.
We collect the opinions of participants using online polls for example, enabling us to derive trends towards particular positions within the professional community. Similarly, we confront the world of science with the perceptions and arguments of stakeholders, turn parties affected into parties involved, and promote the exchange of ideas and information between science, business, society and politics.
At events which also serve to assess ideas or options for action, additional elements such as SWOT analysis or lexicographical methods are possible.
Strategy Papers and Roadmaps
Stakeholders can, however, also be involved through the creation of strategy papers or roadmaps. We use face-to-face meetings to focus attention on a topic and, at the same time, to look outside the box. Participants are empowered to make optimum use of their potential. The latest collaboration tools that comply with all security requirements make the joint creation of documents easier. Through the skilful selection of players, interrelationships are established between technological developments, social challenges and transition processes. The point at which external expert opinions are involved can differ widely in this respect. The first draft of a roadmap may already be created and further developed until finalisation in close cooperation. It may, however, make more sense to involve individual expert opinions in different drafting phases or with reference to individual questions.
Expert Interviews
You can also consult stakeholders by means of interviews or online surveys. In our role as service provider in this respect, we create interview guidelines and question lists in close cooperation with you. For online surveys, powerful software tools and corresponding analysis software are available.
