The ENHANCE Alliance is a network of ten leading European technical universities (Chalmers, TU Delft, Gdańsk Tech, NTNU, Polimi, RWTH Aachen, TU Berlin, UPV, WUT, and ETH Zurich), founded as part of the European Universities Initiative. ETH Zurich joined the Alliance in November 2022 (see ETH news).

My first assignment as the ENHANCE Core Officer at ETH Zurich took place in May 2022 at the Leadership Meeting in Warsaw, following the decision by ETH Zurich’s Executive Board to join the ENHANCE Alliance. The focus there was the proposal for the four-year ENHANCE+ project. Following intensive brainstorming and negotiations, my colleagues and I visited the botanical garden. Inspired by the exotic plants and the colourful flowers, we reflected: ETH’s engagement in ENHANCE will flourish if the institution, its students and staff all benefit from it. ENHANCE should become a garden of innovative education, where ideas can grow.

As the Core Officer, I had the privilege of being one of the gardeners. Among other things, my task was to prepare Rector Günther Dissertori, and Vice-Rector Jan Vermant, for the governance meetings and to accompany them. When ten universities sit down to negotiate, there will be twenty different opinions. Nevertheless, we always managed to reach compromises because we are all working towards the same goal: to prepare our students for their future challenges in business and society. I experienced that ETH’s commitment in the European Higher Education Area is highly valued. ETH is often looked upon as a role model. Of course, we can also learn from our partners, who are pursuing many initiatives, such as digitalisation, with just as much drive and innovation.

The seed of ENHANCE has been sown. It is growing and the first buds are beginning to bloom. Thanks to Julia Wussler and her colleagues, there are now more opportunities for short-term mobility, which enables students to learn and collaborate in an international context. Thanks to project funding from Movetia, the National Agency for Exchange and Mobility, students have access to scholarships. ETH faculty also contributes to attractive learning opportunities, such as the Summer School in Transdisciplinary or in Urban Planning.

The entire Swiss higher education sector benefits from the European Universities Initiative. We exploit synergies in the digitalisation of administrative processes. Florian Hilfinger from RWTH Aachen and David Sichau from ETH Zurich jointly lead the IT Infrastructure & Services work package. They have carried out a feasibility study on the use of verifiable credentials for digital data transfer between universities. We have shared these findings with swissuniversities and launched a national project for issuing digital credentials.

The benefits for ETH go beyond academic collaboration. It is the many personal connections between people that bring significant individual and institutional value – they are the “fertiliser” for trust, ongoing collaboration and development. I now hand over the “rake and hoe” to my successor, Anna-Katharina Lautenschütz. I would like to express my gratitude for all the wonderful encounters with the people who contribute to the garden of ENHANCE, ensuring that it continues to flourish and bear fruit.

In early October 2023, we, Ayca Duran and Constance Brouillet, participated in the ENHANCE Alliance Summit on climate-neutral cities taking place at Gdansk University of Technology in Poland. We are doctoral candidates working at the Future Cities Lab (FCL) at ETH Zurich. While Ayca is grounded in architecture and building systems, Constance is grounded in social and environmental sciences.

In a nutshell, the summit launched the second project of the ENHANCE Alliance, welcoming three new partners, TU Delft, Gdansk Tech, and  ETH Zurich. The project aims to strengthen academic collaborations between ten European technical universities, offering a range of opportunities for courses, summer schools, and developing project ideas. We would like to share our impressions from this two-day Summit and our excitement for the new opportunities offered to students of ETH Zurich.

The first day started with a panel discussion on the role of universities as a driving force for urban innovation. Panelists reminded us of the importance for universities to strengthen relationships with a large network of actors, including NGOs, local governments, institutions, and industries, in search of solutions to the pressing urban challenges. In this regard, Prof. Anne Borg, Rector of NTNU, shared the experience of her institution’s collaborations with local municipalities in Norway, embedding students’ projects to solve particular problems. Solving complex problems also requires collaboration between disciplines, among departments, and adopting a system-thinking approach, as Prof. Günther Dissertori, Rector of ETH Zurich, emphasized: The Students Project House and ETH Week are examples within our institution where problems are targeted from a system-thinking approach. The ENHANCE project aims to scale this approach up to engage students across universities.

The day continued with parallel sessions on various methods and approaches to contribute to climate-neutral cities. During one of the workshops, participants delved into the challenges related to participation in urban planning: time, language, and trust. In other words, participation cannot be done without dedicating enough time, using an appropriate and accessible common language, and, last but not least, building trust to engage meaningfully with actors. In another workshop, researchers from RWTH Aachen presented a tool to help engage actors in co-designing the future of their regions and cities. Finally, we exchanged views on how (Urban) Living Labs may help facilitate transdisciplinary research for societal transition.

Finally, students from the partner universities who took part in a 3-month project were invited to present their prototypes. The projects ranged from a chat to help first-year bachelor students to an artificial intelligence system that can determine the best times to use renewable energy to a food app that monitors diet and waste and offers sustainability advice. These projects demonstrate the ENHANCE project’s potential and offer promising solutions to current issues.

Beyond the summit, we had the opportunity to visit the old town of Gdansk, with its water canal, brick, and colourful buildings, and taste the traditional dumplings – worth visiting!

It has now been almost a decade since Swiss higher education institutions such as ETH Zurich have been excluded from the European mobility and exchange programme Erasmus+. Since then, ETH Zurich has been building alternative relations with European counterparts to avert the negative consequences as far as possible. One of these attempts is the ENHANCE Alliance, a network of 10 technical universities in Europe, which ETH Zurich joined last year. The Student Forum is an integral part of the Alliance’s governance and is composed of at least two representatives of every member university. It meets at least four times a year. At least once a year, the Student Forum meets in presence. In this context, three student representatives from ETH Zurich visited NTNU in Trondheim, Norway at the beginning of June 2023.

The aim of this meeting was to decide on how the Student Forum can work effectively within the Alliance. We decide on an internal structure, and an action plan for the following years. We exchanged our expectations and wishes for the Student Forum, and for the Alliance as a whole. We also discussed organisational aspects such as internal distribution of responsibilities and digital channels of communication. We also started writing bylaws for the organisation in order to build a solid foundation for future generations of student representatives.

As an outcome of these constructive discussions, we established two working groups. The first working group will continue formalising the structures of the Student Forum and complete the bylaws. The second group is currently working on a guide for new student representatives inside the Student Forum to ensure continuity despite rapid changes in representatives.

This exchange was also an opportunity to visit NTNU and discover the unique spirit of this university in the far north. Further, we exchanged with our peers from the student association and learned about their way of operating. We are thankful for the reception we got, in particular for the chance to meet the Pro-rector for Education Prof Marit Reitan. We discussed the role of AI in education and assessments, and the connected opportunities and risks it entails, over lunch. A further point of discussion was post-pandemic teaching and lecture recordings, as well as innovations in didactics.