Governance IDEX

The project UCA^JEDI, selected in 2016 by the international jury for Initiatives of Excellence, aimed to develop a large research-intensive university on the Côte d'Azur. Our ambition was to develop strong regional roots and to play a transformational role in the local ecosystem, interwoven with the public and private community. This new approach was to serve as a model for developing international relations: the idea was to connect entire ecosystems rather than to merely establish single inter-university partnerships. The project also broke with conventional practices and methods for developing the attractiveness of the future university. The aim was to provide faculty with the resources they need to succeed, and thus attract the best researchers; develop more attractive academic programmes to appeal to the best international students; create targeted, high-level and very active international partnerships; jointly develop genuine R&D projects with companies; foster a lively student community on the Côte d'Azur; and transform the university's administration in order to adopt a project mode of operation.
After 4 years of work, the objectives have been met and have often even exceeded what we had proposed or only imagined 4 years ago.

• The first success of our initiative is the amplification of an initiative that had been developed and drafted by a small number of people into a widely shared collective endeavour, as exemplified by the 500+ current UCA^JEDI projects. Most of these projects are transdisciplinary and bring together several members of different UCA^JEDI consortium institutions. The structures that we had imagined for our UCA^JEDI initiative of excellence, such as the Academies, make a valuable contribution as incubators for new ideas. Endowed chairs co-funded with our partners allow us to attract highly qualified international researchers and offer them the best conditions.
• The second success is undoubtedly our institutional transformation. We created the target university as planned in 2016: Université Côte d’Azur, which quickly acquired a strong and visible identity. We reorganised all our graduate programmes within Graduate Schools, which are now at the heart of our system. These bring together and actively involve all the component and associate institutions of the University, together with the national research organisations (EPST). UCA^JEDI also allowed us to create extremely attractive Master of Science programmes designed to attract international students. Actions in favour of student life were diversified and reinforced.
• The third success is our profound impact on the region. Many collaborations were developed in the field of innovation over the past 4 years: in our Innovation and Partnership calls for proposals, the leverage effect averages 5 euros from companies and partners for each euro from UCA^JEDI. This support has remained constant throughout the initiative and was renewed with our successful application for 3IA. Finally, regional authorities no longer plan any action in the field of higher education and innovation without a partnership with Université Côte d'Azur (see Testimonials).
• Significant accomplishments have also been achieved in terms of international outreach. Thanks to UCA^JEDI, we were able to organise our actions around 3 main goals:
  • 1- targeted collaboration with specific major international universities, and in this respect our partnership with Laval University (Quebec) has been a great success;
  • 2- collaboration with universities in emerging countries as illustrated by the physical presence of UCA on the Danang campus;
  • 3- collaborations in Europe with our participation in the UlyssEUs university network. In each case, local ecosystems are actively engaged.

The relatively small size of Université Côte d'Azur implies that our impact is certainly stronger in terms of relative intensity than absolute power. The best indicator to reflect this specific feature is certainly the Leiden ranking which gives the size-corrected proportion of top 10 publications without fractional counting. With this indicator, we reached the second position among all French universities, which indicates clear progress and allows us to anticipate and work towards ever better world rankings in the years to come, but also towards a continuous improvement of our research, our academic programmes, our outreach, our operational efficiency, and our ties with our partners.

Albert AMMERMAN, Colgate University
Albert LIBCHABER, Rockfeller University
Brigitte KIEFFER, Mc Gill University
Fabienne CASOLI, Observatoire de Paris
Gérard BERRY, Collège de France
Giovanni DOSI, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pise
Robert MACKAY, University of Warwick
Sierd CLOETINGH, Utrecht University
Stéphane MALLAT, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
Thomas JENTSCH, Leibniz Institute
Howard GILLMAN, Chancellor UC Irvine

Frédéric ALLARD, IBM
Laurent LONDEIX, ORANGE
Claude GIAFFERRI, AMADEUS
Eric K. HUTCHINGS, Utah House of Representatives
Christophe PEREZ, Team Côte d'Azur