INITIATE is a project that aims to empower higher education institutions to develop R&I through institution transformation. INITIATE, in its widening dimension, seeks to raise excellence in science and knowledge valorisation of Europe's universities through cooperation and knowledge circulation. Through stakeholder inclusion and co-design approach, INITIATE will design an approach for institution transformation that will reflect on the current needs and resources of the institution, external elements such as policy barriers, good practices from other initiatives and identification of possible collaboration areas with other institutions including local ecosystems. Through iterative process and R&I Labs supported by online tools such as Knowledge Hub, INITIATE will generate policy recommendations for helping stimulate R&I development and scientific excellence in Widening countries, in addition to research outputs and creation of joint applications for other funding sources (e.g. Horizon Europe). The approach will be demonstrated in Croatia, Portugal and north Macedonia. This will finally result in a roadmap for long term uptake of R&I in widening countries with identified replication cases and forming of the Alliance for green energy transition that will assure the long-term sustainability of INITIATE results. The action focuses on universities in Widening countries, in which the cases for the implementation of INITIATE approach will be conducted. Additionally, the project aims to achieve several outcomes, including the successful institutional reform and upgrade of higher education institutions in the R&I dimension, empowerment to be actors of change, and the mainstreaming of a culture of excellence in science and value creation amongst higher education institutions, particularly in less research-intensive institutions and countries. To achieve these outcomes, the project will engage universities as well as local ecosystems.

A growing body of comparative political economy literature argues that western countries are increasingly dualised. According to this strand, the gap between workers is expanding. Some workers are covered by collective agreements, have standard contracts and have access to standard social protection, while others hold atypical contracts, have access to a second-tier welfare state and are not covered by collective agreements. This dualisation process results from labour legislation reforms that allowed the spread of atypical contracts; welfare state reforms, that allowed the creation of residual, income-tested, and in-work benefits for some individuals; and collective bargaining reforms that eroded collective bargaining coverage. The covid-19 pandemic has made even clearer the need to rethink these divisions, which are characterised by the existence of winners and losers. The guiding question of this project is: under which conditions can dualisation be overcome and solidarity fostered? The project focusses on one key dimension of dualisation: the regulation and use of atypical contracts, i.e. fixed-term contracts, self-employment and agency work. From our perspective, the type of contract is a key element of dualisation, and is of paramount importance to explain labour market inequalities and the disintegration of solidarity in the sphere of work. Thus, when speaking about reforms that foster solidarity, we mean inclusive reforms that improve the protection provided by atypical contracts. The main argument of the project is that fostering solidarity involves three levels of action: labour law (national), collective bargaining (meso and micro) and workplace-level arrangements (micro). Labour law plays a decisive role in establishing the conditions under which atypical contracts can be used. Collective agreements are important because they can define better (or worse) conditions than those established in the labour code regarding the use of atypical contracts. And it ...

Are employers active players in the process of nurturing and driving skill supply by younger university graduates? And how do they interact with Universities in shaping graduates' skills? Firms rely upon timely availability of skills to compete and grow, while workers depend on their skills to access jobs and, more importantly, high quality jobs. The purpose of this research programme (RP) is to examine employers' strategies to access the skills they need by either recruiting skilled employees from the labour market (LM) or by training their internal labour force. This choice reflects the make-or-buy alternative typical of all production factors, yet the centrality of human resources and the uncertainty surrounding the outcomes of programmes targeted at their development turn this choice into a critical driver of firm survival. Due to the crucial roles played by graduates from higher education (HE) institutions in shaping growth and innovation processes, this RP focuses on HE under- and post-graduates. When do employers prefer ready-to-work over ready-to learn graduates? What individual characteristics encourage internal training? Which solutions may support university-to-work transitions and consequently reduce or avoid skill problems? The underlying assumption is that the match between skill demand and skill supply depends on the ability of HE institutions to provide students with appropriate skills but also on firms' human resource policies and practices. To account for the intertwined roles of HE institutions and employers this RP explores both anticipative and remedial strategies and pursues five specific goals: 1) identify the employability skills for younger HE graduates in national and international LMs; 2) examine firms' strategies to access and develop required skills; 3) explore employers' expectations from HE institutions; 4) explore how employers' skill policies affect job quality of younger graduates; and 5) explore the relationship between HE and firm...

This project addresses the transformations of the employment regime that took place in Portugal in the context of global economic restructuring of the last decades and its onsequences in respect to employment and work. The deleterious impacts on work of the growing internationalization of production and concomitant financialisation have been salient in a country vulnerable to delocalization of production, macroeconomic imbalances and indebtedness. These impacts reached their zenith with the Global Financial Crisis and ensuing "troika" financial bail-out in 2011. At the time a reconfiguration of employment regime aimed at internal devaluation was spelled out in the troika's Memoradum and implemented, affecting institutions and rules governing employment protection, working time arrangements, unemployment benefits and collective bargaining. Building on previous research that characterized the institutional reconfiguration associated with internal devaluation as a regressive one that amounted to a transfer of income from labor to capital and to a change of power resources unfavorable to organized labor, the project intends to broaden this research in two different ways. First, it extends the assessment of devaluation of work to key dimensions of the quality of employment and working conditions that might have been directly deteriorated as a result of the reconfiguration of employment regime (in particular wages, working time and job security). Second, by analyzing actors' strategies and power resources at national, sector, and company level it pin points long term consequences of internal devaluation its drivers, and means to counteract them. The project conjectures that the institutional reconfiguration of the Portuguese employment regime and internal devaluation may have accelerated a process of cumulative devaluation of work involving loss of competences and skills, investment retrenchment, increasing inequalities, and demographic decay, whose relations and drivers ...

Who benefited most from the re-regulation of labour markets which affected most of EU countries in the 1990s? The guidelines of the European Employment Strategy stress the need to promote flexibility combined with employment security and to ensure employment-friendly labour cost developments and wage-setting mechanisms [Ce05]. Despite higher occupation and employment rates, the outcome of 20 years of labour market flexibility is not clear yet. Flexibility allowed employers to face increasingly competitive markets, yet claims exist that contract flexibility was also used to cut labour and training costs [RaScHa00]. Contract flexibility has also been accused of driving large shares of younger workers and other groups of disadvantages employees to career paths characterised by temporary contracts, lower wages, poor working conditions, and low training. Literature on employment relationships has achieved important results, but several gaps still exist. The core idea of this research project is that wage dynamics and the use of flexible contracts are driven by the wage policy of a firm and by environmental conditions. Thus, the research programme jointly developed by a Portuguese and an Italian research unit, will take advantage of two national administrative linked employer-employee panel databases: Quadros do Pessoal, and Work Histories Italian Panel (WHIP). The research programme is based on a multidisciplinary, comparative, and pluralist approach and it is expected to produce new theoretical models and empirical evidence on the joint use of contract flexibility and targeted wage policies by firms.