Abstract:

The international project LAURDS (Latin American University Research and Doctoral Support), co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, was conducted between January 2016 and October 2018. The project consortium included four Latin American universities from Colombia and Panama; and four European universities from Germany, Slovenia, Spain and the UK. This paper first describes the Research Strategy Development Roadmap (RSDR) framework developed within the LAURDS project. The RSDR comprises instruments to assess and develop the research strategy at academic institutions with special focus on Latin America. Part of the instrument is the Research Strategy Maturity Assessment (RSMA) instrument, which comprises 167 questions across nine elements of research strategy. The purpose of the instrument is to indicate the strengths and weaknesses of institutional research strategy from multiple stakeholder perspectives.

In this paper, we present the RSDR framework along with a case study of deploying the RSMA instrument at an academic institution located in Bogotá, Colombia. The instrument is deployed to generate data from stakeholders including the university leaders and research practitioners. On the basis of the data, the paper contrasts the stakeholder perceptions of the maturity of the nine research strategy areas that include: research mission and vision; research profile; research organisation and governance; research people; alliances and collaboration; research funding and infrastructure; research outputs; research impact and promotion; and public policy and accreditation.

By analysing the survey results and the differences in stakeholder perceptions using a tool developed in the LAURDS project, we derive development guidelines for the institution’s research strategy. In addition, we use the deployment to evaluate the RSDR instrument, demonstrating its potential usefulness at other academic institutions.

Keywords:

Academic research, research strategy, Latin America, EU, Erasmus.