Why did you get involved with CUCo?

When I heard the name Centre for Unusual Collaborations for the first time, like many people I thought “That sounds interesting! What’s that?”. I learned that the centre was new and on a mission to change academia, and create a space where young researchers could do exciting research and collaborate across disciplines and knowledge domains.  I wanted to be a part of that.

More specifically: I was working with NWO at the time, I had been working on research funding for eleven years. I met Jessica Duncan [founding CUCo Board member] at a conference about food security, and we got along really well. Jessica had just helped establish CUCo and needed some expertise about funding. We had a nice chat and I  gave her some advice. Soon afterwards I emailed her to ask if there were any  positions available at CUCo. Jessica replied that CUCo was about to open up a position for a director, to which I applied and there was a spark with the rest of the CUCo board too. And so I started pretty soon.

The centre itself hadn’t shaped up yet at that point. There was a fantastic name, a fantastic logo and a tentative setup for Spark and UCo, but that was about it. We were still in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic back then and CUCo’s Nest didn’t exist yet, so initially from home we started to further build out CUCo. There was a lot of ambition and there were a lot of ideas, as well as an outspoken vision about CUCo’s purpose: less competition, more collaboration in academia. The founding CUCo Board members  were generally very busy because they were assistant or associate professors. There was a need, therefore, for someone with a background in research funding who could fully dedicate themselves to CUCo.

What makes working at CUCo unique?

The advantage of working at CUCo is that we’re close to the early and mid-career researchers across the alliance, and that, together with them, we decide and design what we do. Everything we develop comes from the CUCo community and meets the community’s needs,  not confined by a lot of regulations. When we allocate funding it is based on trust. Much like the EWUU Board trusted the CUCo founders to do something meaningful with the funding that was made available for them.

CUCo aims to lower the barriers to collaboration that are mostly held up by rewards and recognition frameworks, that  follow the competitive academic culture. CUCo funding will not directly lead to academic breakthroughs, it is meant to contribute to a university that is better equipped to do so.  The grants are spent on the teams, who get the opportunity to develop themselves with CUCo’s assistance: as much directed at the researcher as at the research. In that way they get  to explore their inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations: how do you integrate knowledge across disciplines and knowledge fields? That process can ultimately lead to research addressing societal issues better and thus helps to change academia.

Why was it important to you to enable the unusual research ideas that are explored at CUCo?

If you start from what you already know, it’s very difficult to get to something bigger that you don’t know yet. The promise of inter- and transdisciplinary research is that it brings different perspectives  together, ultimately leading to knowledge integration. This is where the new emerges, the potential for breakthroughs. But before you can accomplish knowledge integration you need to be lost for some time. This is  important  in an environment where everyone’s being trained all day long to know, and not so much to ask questions, to doubt and to not know.

There’s a lot of value in not getting to work right away with a polished idea. Exploring the unpolished, getting started before you have an actual question, is key. To proceed in a certain direction just to see what happens. That’s not necessarily something big, but something may emerge that hasn’t been tried yet, allowing some other new thing to emerge. You need to peel off a few layers of certainty and be humble in order to get closer to each other in a collaborative process. To shake the foundations a little bit, requiring everyone to find a new balance together. At CUCo I learned that the unpolished and the exploration is where the fun is. I think that in academia we forget sometimes how important it is to have fun and make friends in the process of collaboration.

CUCo is about five years old now. Is it a toddler, a teenager, or perhaps an adolescent?

We’re way beyond toddler stage now, and probably beyond the teenage years as well. We obviously started out by challenging the system at large. In the meantime, we’ve had a reality check: what can we actually do, and what can’t we do? I think CUCo is an adolescent now, in the sense that you begin to see what’s been invested in it: we can slowly begin to harvest. An essence of CUCo is learning by doing: everything we do feeds back to what we are already doing. The adolescent definitely didn’t get there just by mistake, we thought about it properly and have designed the Spark and UCo funding schemes, including its support process carefully. It is not very common that research funders engage as closely with funded teams as CUCo does, but it is key for us to understand how the inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations in the teams are conceptualized organized, what are their lessons and insights. We’ve always said they are the living experiments: CUCo can only be a centre of expertise on collaboration because of all the efforts of the teams that they have generously shared with us.

And if you would be invited to CUCo’s tenth birthday party in five years, what do you hope to find?

I hope to find the same enthusiasm and an even bigger CUCo community. And that CUCo’s  way of working has been adopted elsewhere to an even larger extent, because it makes so much sense. I don’t think that CUCo itself necessarily should become bigger in that process, I simply hope that the ideas will come to fruition in other places.

What’s the thing you’re most proud of from your four years at CUCo? What do you consider a success?

I consider what CUCo is right now as a success. We have a committed team and CUCo is a thriving part of the EWUU alliance. A good number of Spark and UCo teams have been funded through CUCo, exploring new research fields and everyone’s got a lot of enthusiasm. It’s just incredible that people show up for the events that we organize just because they want to be part of the CUCo community. They tell us that CUCo offers a corner in academia where they are fulfilled in a way they aren’t somewhere else, where they experience freedom. I think the importance of that cannot be overestimated.  Also, other universities and organizations across the knowledge domain in the Netherlands and internationally reach out continuously to learn from, and collaborate with, CUCo: it has already made some waves in the academic world.

Your new job is in the Dutch humanitarian sector. Which lessons and insights will you be taking with you to your new job, and perhaps even the rest of your life?

That, when it comes to knowledge, the magic lies in a place where there’s a lot of freedom, but that also offers structure and support, and where means are available to further explore that place and allow for experiments to happen. That this makes people very happy. That, ultimately, competition and prestige don’t lead to the best possible academia.

Looking at the current state of the world, I think the system needs to be fundamentally changed if we want to contribute something with the knowledge that’s available to us. Knowledge can only contribute by means of a properly facilitated collaboration that involves knowledge practitioners.

And what will you be letting go of?

I find it quite difficult to let go of the entire CUCo club. The people I worked with and that ‘us-against-the-system’ feeling. To have been a part of that was just awesome. What I also find hard to let go of, is to represent something that was so well received. To be met with a smile wherever you go and mention the Centre for Unusual Collaborations. CUCo generates so much excitement. And of course I find it hard to let go of the CUCo team, it was a pleasure to work with them.

Lastly, how did CUCo change you as a person?

Do you remember that slogan “collaboration instead of competition”? I really internalized that one. It’s not even such a groundbreaking slogan, but I’ve realized how much we could achieve if we take that to heart. To take a step back as an individual in order to enable others and the collective to step forward.

CUCo thanks Corinne for all her efforts in the past four years, and wishes her all the best with her new job!