Flagship Get Together 2026

Didier Beloin-Saint-Pierre, Flagship WISER - Bridging transdisciplinary stakeholders: challenges and strategies for sustainable collaboration

Flagships bring together a wide range of stakeholders from the public and private sectors, all engaged in R&D from different perspectives. This often leads to mismatched timelines, differing interpretations of goals, and long-term project plans that struggle to keep pace with rapidly changing industrial needs and research priorities.

Maike Scherrer, Flagships SmartUMH & Circulus - Flagship Survival Guide. Lessons, Leaps, and Pitfalls

Compared to traditional Innosuisse-funded projects, flagship projects are characterised by longer durations, larger consortia and often additional stakeholders. These groups must be coordinated efficiently, collaborative work must be enabled in interdisciplinary teams, and it must be ensured that all information flows in sufficient breadth and depth. The aim of the planned session is to exchange experiences, share tips and tricks, but also to highlight negative examples to prevent other consortia from falling into the same traps. At the end, successful practices should be derived from previous experiences and prepared in such a way that they can be shared with other flagship consortia, not participating in this session.

This breakout session will explore what effective communication means in the everyday work of flagship managers. Participants are invited to share key challenges they face in transdisciplinary collaboration and the strategies they have developed to address them, with the aim of identifying solutions that may benefit others. We will also share insights from WISER, which focuses on building digital bridges between GHG assessment data and tools to support more reliable and effective collaboration

Salvatore Oricchio & Christoph Steiner, Flagship Green Energy Hub - Navigating Flagships to Success: From Ambition to Impact

What distinguishes a Flagship project from a standard Innosuisse project? This breakout session dives into the systemic ambition, transformative impact, and implementation complexity that define Flagships. We’ll explore the challenges of leading large, multi-stakeholder collaborations, integrating emerging technologies, and balancing bold innovation with practical constraints — while ensuring long-term value beyond the funding period.

Florian Ruesch, Flagship SwissSTES - Applied case studies for a fast ramp-up and for successful, transdisciplinary research

Are large research projects effective, and is transdisciplinary research just a buzzword, or does it actually work? In many large-scale research projects, the ramp-up phase is lengthy, and developing a shared storyline and fostering collaboration across diverse activities can be challenging. This is also true for flagship projects. In the SwissSTES flagship project, industry-driven case studies helped to overcome these challenges. Guided by the implementation partners’ needs, the case studies posed real, practical problems that the research teams had to address from day one. In doing so, they set the stage for natural and successful transdisciplinary collaboration at a rapid pace. Together, we will identify and discuss potential success factors for overcoming the challenges described above in large research projects such as flagships.