Seminar on ‘Communicating Higher Education: Image and Reality’. Promoting Institutional Identity

One of the responses to increasing competition in higher education is the trend to set up consortia of universities. The IDEA League (Imperial College London, TU Delft, ETH Zürich, RWTH Aachen), an alliance of four leading European technical universities, collaborates to learn from each other, share expertise and experience. We will discuss how this alliance copes with the competitive aspects when collaborating on strategic issues. How do you promote the alliance when you are also competitors? How do you build a new brand name with four universities each having a strong identity? For this, an important factor is the cultural and organisational context of the four universities. Common educational quality management principles have been established which led to mutual recognition of degrees with the key aim of enhancing student mobility as part of the curriculum. This common approach provides input for the development of a joint image, but we still have to deal with the fact that all four universities want to attract, and keep, the best students. We would like to provide examples of how an alliance of universities circumvents these issues to establish a group identity. The alliance strives to establish a framework overcoming damaging aspects of competition and focusing on group culture in collaboration