Working on Your Promotion Packet? Don’t Miss This ISSIP Opportunity

Terri Griffith, Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Simon Fraser University; 2022 ISSIP President

Colleagues, if you are working on your promotion packet, make sure you highlight community impact, leadership, and external technical eminence. While these are important parts of promotion packets for industry and academia, I’ll focus on an ISSIP opportunity aligned to academic promotion and tenure.

Leadership and Impact

Consider that many schools look for evidence of leadership and impact as you move from Associate to Full Professor:

From the Cal State System: Service criteria: “Candidates for promotion from Associate Professor to Professor must provide evidence of leadership in one or more service activities in addition to demonstrating sustained active participation in both internal and external service activities.”

University of Melbourne: “The University recognises leadership and service within professions, communities and the University itself. Leadership is an expectation of a Professor at the University and applicants for promotion to Level E are required to address this as part of their argued case.”

That said, not just academic organizations look for professional service leadership and impact as they consider promotion decisions. Please read on regardless of your current job.

Be a Leader within ISSIP through Grant or Foundation Funding Proposals

ISSIP volunteers lead ISSIP’s AI Collab and publishing activities. The AI Collab and publishing activities greatly impact ISSIP, the colleagues involved, and the broader ISSIP community these programs touch. How might leading a funding proposal related to ISSIP support your research and teaching, or what Canadian funding sources call “Knowledge Mobilization” and the US NSF describes as “Broader Impact”?

In the past, ISSIP successfully competed for US National Science Foundation grants related to research and workshops on workforce readiness. ISSIP was also a partner in a project funded by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs. This evidence of success is a stepping stone for future proposals. The ISSIP community of service innovation professionals spans industry, academia, government- so the breadth and depth of the ISSIP community provides multiple perspectives on the future of skills and work practices. New knowledge exploration and creation projects, can benefit from surveys, workshops, and whitepapers in partnership with ISSIP community of practice participants.

Next Steps

You are the best judge of appropriate funding opportunities and how working with ISSIP can support your research, expertise, and interests. That said, I did leverage ChatGPT’s deep research capability to track down some open calls:

Cisco Research RFPs
European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)
EU Funding & Tenders Portal
UK Research and Innovation
European Cooperation in Science & Technology (COST)

What might you discover? What work do you wish ISSIP did if it had the funding?

Please reach out. I’m happy to help you identify other ISSIP-affiliated faculty or to brainstorm ideas.

P.S. Check out this opportunity for more junior faculty and postdocs from Volkswagen and its requirement of “involvement of actors outside of academia” (AKA, ISSIP!)