Gender, Power, and Disinformation Across Borders (DIS/CONNECT) is a virtual, interdisciplinary, and transnational intensive workshop series that brings together students, early-career researchers, and practitioners to critically engage with the intersections of gender, sexuality, human rights, and digital cultures. Category: Incubator Grant University: University of Bern, University of Göttingen, University of Groningen

The ENLIGHT Empathy Incubator (E²) is a 5 ECTS Blended Intensive Programme designed to empower students to use empathy as a driver for innovation, inclusive leadership, and societal impact. Category: Incubator Grant University: University of the Basque Country, University of Bern, University of Galway, Ghent University, University of Tartu Period: 2025-2027 The ENLIGHT Empathy Incubator (E²) is a 5 ECTS Blended Intensive Programme designed to empower students to use empathy as a driver for innovation, inclusive leadership, and societal impact. The programme follows a full blended pathway: pre-online empathy foundations, an intensive experiential in-person week, and a post-online reflective and impact-focused phase. Through immersive experiences, lived-experience partner engagement, empathy games, design thinking, problem framing, and multidisciplinary collaboration, students tackle ENLIGHT flagship challenges related to equity, health and wellbeing, digitalisation, climate, and culture. Students develop competencies mapped to the ENLIGHT Competence Framework and EntreComp, including critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, global citizenship, and adaptability. By integrating community partners as co-educators and using challenge-based methodologies, the programme delivers authentic societal impact and builds long-term capacity for human-centred innovation across ENLIGHT institutions. The incubator provides a unique European model for empathy-driven learning, combining emotional intelligence development with innovation competencies to create graduates equipped to lead meaningful change. "The defining highlight of E² is its deep partnership with lived-experience contributors, who join the programme as co-educators. This creates transformative learning moments in which students confront real human stories, challenge their assumptions, and build authentic empathy that directly informs their innovation process. The result is a genuinely human-centred environment that blends academic rigour Standardised Enlight with emotional learning."

This project will lay the foundation for a PM (Precision Medicine) education network built around the FRONTLINERS online platform currently hosted by the University of Bern. Category: Incubator Grant University: University of Bern, University of Galway, Ghent University

This virtual exchange project explores transatlantic migration from Europe to the Americas during the long 19th century (ca. 1760–ca. 1914), with a focus on Swiss, Italian, French, German, and Iberian experiences.. Category: Incubator Grant University: University of the Basque Country, University of Bern Period: 2025-2027 This virtual exchange project explores transatlantic migration from Europe to the Americas during the long 19th century (ca. 1760–ca. 1914), with a focus on Swiss, Italian, French, German, and Iberian experiences. Students will investigate migrant narratives and voices using digitized and non-digitized archival materials – such as letters, photographs, newspapers, administrative records, and memoirs – and share their findings across borders. The course will emphasize how migrants were integrated into their host societies and how they actively shaped the processes they were involved in. Special attention will be given to the role of migration in driving political, economic, social, cultural, scientific, and intellectual transformations in the emerging nations of the Americas. "The most outstanding feature of this course is that it brings together students from both the sending and receiving countries involved in the mass migration processes of the long nineteenth century. In most cases, students encounter national narratives that approach this topic from a narrowly focused, country-specific perspective. This course offers students the opportunity not only to share these narratives with one another but also to move beyond them, enabling the collaborative construction of a broader and more integrated understanding of their shared past."

The education initiative encompasses lecturers of the disciplines of business administration, economics, and sustainability. The initiative envisions the creation of a collaborative network as well as an annually recurrent joint course, a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP), worth 3 ECTS. Category: Incubator Grant University: University of Bern, University of Bordeaux, Ghent University Period: 2025-2027 The education initiative encompasses lecturers of the disciplines of business administration, economics, and sustainability. The initiative envisions the creation of a collaborative network as well as an annually recurrent joint course, a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP), worth 3 ECTS. With this project, the collaborative network addresses a common gap: the limited integration of sustainability and its complexity in business administration and economics. On the one hand, the BIP course directly addresses this gap. On the other hand, through mutual learning, each project partner can draw inspiration from the others’ approaches, creating momentum to embed sustainability more deeply into business administration and economics curricula beyond the BIP. Accordingly, the expected impact of this project is that the future graduates of the participating study programmes – the future CEOs, business leaders, sustainability professionals – will contribute to making the economy and business more environmentally and socially sustainable. The BIP course begins with remote virtual classes and slidecasts on relevant content from all three disciplines (incl. concepts) such as doughnut economics, behavioral economics, sustainable business models, environmental and social justice, post-growth and critical economics studies, governance of sustainability transformation, intercultural collaboration, and more. This is followed by an intensive five-day on-campus week – the actual highlight of the course – during which priority is given to interaction, reflection, real-world labs, and elaboration. In terms of didactics, the campus week focuses on the process of learning of the students, using formative assessment techniques to support the progress of learning. This includes teaching and learning formats such as challenge-based and project-based learning, problem-solving interdisciplinary group work, interviews with practitioners, site visits, creative writing, as well as student-centered positionality. There will be room for critical discussions, reflections, and students will interpret take home messages using creative, artistic methods to produce memorable outputs such as short theatre, poem, painting, audio-visual products or alike. Each turn, another University hosts the campus week. This offers the lecturers an opportunity to benefit more intensively from each others‘ expertise, case studies, and networks.

The Summer School Sustainability in the Middle East (SMILE) aims at offering a unique platform for advanced bachelor and master students to delve into pressing issues surrounding sustainability in the region, gaining a comprehensive and nuanced perspective from professionals and scholars from different fields. Category: Incubator Grant University: University of Bern Period: 2024-2027