Creating excellent research requires far-sighted and experienced research management with highly qualified staff. This leads to excellent, creative and innovative research environments where the very best talents are free to pursue their intuition and curiosity.

A strong and cohesive research environment functions best in shared physical surroundings, but can also be of a more virtual nature. In this connection, it is generally essential that excellent environments always work closely with other international elite environments in the form of specific research collaboration or networks.

The University of Aarhus has many strong research environments. These environments must be strengthened and new ones developed. The research environments themselves contribute to meeting the overall strategy. Good research environments make it possible to recruit the best staff members, result in considerable research production of a high quality, and are largely responsible for the development of research talent.

In some subject areas, it is essential to create environments that are sufficiently large to have unique facilities and data material that enable major issues to be tackled at the cutting edge. Such environments often cross department or institute and faculty boundaries. Strong research environments are created and stimulated by a number of factors relating to management and staff resources, as well as excellent physical and economic conditions that match the very best in the field.

The aims and objectives are:

• to establish a framework that facilitates the development of new creative international research environments at the university.

The University of Aarhus has decided:

• to attract more international researchers with a potential for research management
• to avoid detailed control and create an opportunity for long-term strategic research planning
• to ensure that the financial and administrative principles support the long-term staff and talent development of the research environments
• to develop new flexible organisational structures and forms of employment
• to prepare indicators for “a good research environment” and monitor development on an ongoing basis.