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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - InGRID-2 (Integrating Research Infrastructure for European expertise on Inclusive Growth from data to policy)

Teaser

Referring to the increasingly challenging ambitions of the EU2020 strategy, the InGRID-2 project sets out to advance the integration and innovation of distributed social sciences research infrastructures on ‘poverty, living conditions and social policies’ and ‘working...

Summary

Referring to the increasingly challenging ambitions of the EU2020 strategy, the InGRID-2 project sets out to advance the integration and innovation of distributed social sciences research infrastructures on ‘poverty, living conditions and social policies’ and ‘working conditions, vulnerability and labour policies’. With the EU2020 strategy, European policy-makers aim to overcome the structural weaknesses in the EU’s economy, improve its competitiveness and productivity and underpin a sustainable social market economy. To this end, policy-makers need to be equipped with evidence-based insights into the challenges related to social exclusion, vulnerability-at-work, and related issues, as well as the strategies that can be used to advance in this area.
Being a research infrastructure project, InGRID-2 aims to provide the scientific community with resources and services to conduct top-level research contributing to inclusive growth. Key tools in this social science research are all types of data: statistics on earnings, administrative social data, labour market data, surveys of quality of life or working conditions, and policy indicators. In the social sciences, such sources tend to be difficult to access, based on different conceptualisations and approaches, and highly distributed, complicating comparative research. Helping scientists to enhance their expertise on inclusive growth from data to policy is the mission of InGRID-2. InGRID-2 serves pre-users, lead users and end users. Especially lead users, who are social scientists involved in comparative research to provide new evidence for European policy innovations, are an important target group for InGRID-2. The focus areas on InGRID-2 are a) integrated and harmonised data, (b) links between policy and practice, and (c) indicator-building tools.
Building on the foundations laid in InGRID-1, InGRID-2 will extend transnational on-site and virtual access, organise mutual learning and discussions of innovations, and improve data services and facilities of comparative research. Extending the research infrastructure to all EU countries is an important mission on the agenda for InGRID-2, in which virtual access plays a key role. Short and long-term visiting grants allow researchers to experiment with and work on key data sets and tools within a context of mutual knowledge exchange and cross-fertilisation. In addition, a research portal is being set up to serve as the gateway to the InGRID-2 infrastructure. Networking activities will provide initiation (summer schools), in-depth discussions (expert workshops), and help promote necessary innovations for sustainable inclusive growth (through data forums, strategic interest groups, stakeholder platforms, round tables and an experts-in-residence programme).
Key science actors and their stakeholders are coupled in the consortium to provide expert services to users of comparative research infrastructures by investing in collaborative efforts to better integrate micro-data, identify new ways of collecting data, establish and improve harmonised classification tools, extend available policy databases, optimise statistical quality, and set-up microsimulation environments and indicator-building tools as important means of valorisation. This work is performed through a number of joint research activities, which concentrate on extending data integration, exploring new data linkage and sources, innovating microsimulation tools, improving comparative policy data, and investigating new high-quality indicators.
InGRID-2 brings together 19 partners from 14 EU Member States.

Work performed

In the first reporting period, various objectives have already been achieved:
• 19 deliverables are submitted;
• 42 milestones are achieved, of which:
- 5 summer schools, 3 expert workshops (including one extra), 2 data forums, 2 special interest groups, 1 roundtable are organised;
- 9 joint research papers or tools for analysis are finalised;
• 97 applicants were offered a visiting grant in four calls for TNA, for in total 971 visiting days that have been taken up during the reporting period or starting in November.

Final results

The detailed project objectives are the following:
a) Transnational access (TNA)
To advance the transnational access established in the InGRID-1 by (a) raising the targets (+25% on-site access and two virtual access facilities), and (b) adding new facilities. More specifically, InGRID-2 aims to provide a convenient and harmonised transnational access to sixteen social science installations, based on a unified and integrated grant system with the required open selection procedures. On-site access will be provided to more than 250 visitors for a total of 2,520 visiting days. Two infrastructures make the step to virtual access (LIS and UEssex). At least 25% of this TNA will be provided to visitors from newer Member States.
b) Mutual learning activities as networking
To organise knowledge exchange and transfer within the dedicated community-of-interest, by organising eighteen training activities and eleven expert discussion events.
c) Innovation networking activities
To connect broader networks of data providers (through 8 data forums), users’ groups (8 special interest groups) and policy innovators (2 stakeholder conferences) in order to, on the one hand, develop innovation within the infrastructure and, on the other hand, play a knowledge brokering role between the research-community-of-interest and the targeted policy innovation.
d) Joint research activities
To conduct research activities to enhance and enrich the technical quality of the RI that focuses on an improved data integration and harmonisation, upgrading particular analytical tools and making considerable progress in the technique of indicator-building, which is defined as a key instrument by the community-of-interest for an evidence-based impact on policy innovation.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.inclusivegrowth.eu.