#67 Tuscany in Brussels (part 2) w. guest Simona Costa

Brussels has a lot of university liaison offices representing universities from all over Europe. They do a tremendous work – I have seen it with my own eyes. Some universities decide to gather into a collaboration around their Brussels activities. I have an old contact that is representing exactly such an initiative in Brussels. Simona Costa is Head of Office of the university collaboration Tour4EU. It is a collaboration of seven Tuscan universities where they have decided to join forces with a spearhead office in Brussels. Of course I needed to invite in Simona for a talk about how that works. Seven universities are a big mouthful to represent so we discuss of course how they have organized their approach. It became a long talk, so this one is a two-episode release. Last week we talked about the background for the collaboration, dug into the key functions of the office and how they are organized and finally we had a talk about the issue related to thedistance between the liaison office and the region back home in Italy. In this second half we zoom in on the way Simona is structuring the lobbying activities for the seven universities in Tour4EU and then we have a talk about how she secures access to proposals and projects for the Tuscan research communities she supports. Great content for research support professionals and Brussels-representatives.  Time codes: 00:02:25 Lobbying 00:26:10 Project facilitation 00:41:00 The toughest challenge