The research team, led by Karakat Nagymzanova of L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University together with colleagues from Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University and the Kazakh National Women’s Teacher Training University, framed their inquiry around three tasks: identifying the key vectors of development in the Kazakh higher education system, analysing how digital technologies affect the effectiveness of the educational process, and characterising the current state of innovative methods within teaching practice. These questions reflect a broader debate in the literature about how universities manage digital transformation, a process that studies across many countries have shown to be hampered less by technology itself than by institutional structures, assumptions and the readiness of academic staff to change.

At the heart of the project was an empirical experiment involving fifty university employees. Forty members of the department of pedagogy, thirteen men and twenty-seven women, along with ten staff from the university’s resource and methodological centre, four men and six women, took part. The researchers began with a survey of the teaching staff designed to assess the current state of the department’s performance. This diagnostic phase was intended to surface the main problems and needs of the department before any structural intervention was proposed, an approach the authors describe as essential for grounding organisational change in evidence rather than administrative intuition.

The survey results pointed to familiar friction points in university operations. Departments and support units often operate in parallel silos, with methodological expertise concentrated in a central centre while academic departments pursue curriculum development, teaching innovation and quality assurance largely on their own. In a period of rapid digital transformation, this separation can slow the adoption of new teaching technologies, duplicate effort and leave individual faculty members without systematic support when they attempt to introduce innovative methods into their courses. The researchers concluded that these dynamics were influencing the performance indicators of the department and that a coordinated response was needed during what they characterise as a transformational period for Kazakh higher education.

In response, the team developed a model of joint integrative-organisational activity between the department of pedagogy and the resource and methodological centre. The model treats the two structural units as a single interacting space in which planning, methodological support, digital tool deployment and professional development are coordinated rather than fragmented. The concept of an interacting space, one of the keywords attached to the study, captures the idea that the value of collaboration emerges from the structured overlap of the units’ functions: the department contributes disciplinary and pedagogical expertise, while the centre contributes methodological resources, training capacity and institutional knowledge of innovation processes.

The findings suggest that digital transformation and the use of innovative strategies may support the improvement of institutional practices and contribute to strengthening the competitiveness of higher education institutions in Kazakhstan. This conclusion aligns with a substantial international literature cited by the authors, including systematic reviews of digital transformation in universities, analyses of faculty technology integration, and studies of innovation management in higher education. That literature consistently emphasises that successful transformation requires alignment between organisational structure, staff motivation and technological capability, precisely the alignment the proposed model is designed to produce at the level of two university units.

The study also situates itself within Kazakhstan’s national policy context. The authors draw on the state programme for the development of education and science for 2020 to 2025, strategic planning documents from the government, and independent rankings of institutional demand, including the QS World University Rankings for Central Asia. Previous research on Kazakh universities has documented the challenges of the sector’s transition, from the move toward institutional autonomy to capacity building for internationalisation and the evaluation of research effectiveness at pedagogical universities. By connecting a single departmental case to these system-level vectors, the study illustrates how national reform agendas ultimately depend on organisational changes inside individual institutions.

The practical aim of the model is explicitly tied to the quality of professional training for future teachers. Teacher training universities occupy a strategic position in any education system because the competence of their graduates shapes classrooms for decades. The authors argue that innovative techniques, supported by the joint activity of the department and the methodological centre, can raise the quality of that training. The logic is straightforward: if faculty members receive coordinated methodological support, exposure to digital tools and structured opportunities to develop key competencies, the improvements cascade into the preparation of the next generation of teachers. The study’s emphasis on key competencies echoes wider international debates about the skills teachers need in an era of artificial intelligence and digital learning environments.

The research was approved by the Ethics Commission of Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University in May 2025, and all participants were informed of the purpose of the study, its voluntary nature and confidentiality procedures before providing consent. The authors note that artificial intelligence tools were used only for language editing and improving readability, with the authors reviewing all modifications and taking full responsibility for the final content. The study received no external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests. The published article reports that no datasets were generated or analysed during the study, indicating that the empirical work rested on the survey and experimental framework described rather than on secondary data analysis.

For university leaders, the study offers a modest but concrete proposition: that the unit of organisational redesign need not be the whole institution. Much of the literature on higher education restructuring focuses on mergers, consolidations and institutional alliances, processes that are costly, slow and frequently disruptive to faculty morale and research productivity. By contrast, an integrative model operating at the level of a department and a methodological centre can be implemented within existing governance structures, tested locally and adjusted iteratively. The Kazakh case suggests that such fine-grained integration, combined with deliberate digital transformation and attention to staff needs identified through survey evidence, may be a practical pathway for institutions seeking to improve performance during periods of systemic change, and a template that other universities in the region could adapt to their own circumstances.

Subject of Research: A model of joint integrative-organisational activity between a university pedagogy department and its resource and methodological centre to improve teacher training in Kazakhstan

Article Title: Model of joint integrative-organisational activity of the pedagogical department and the resource and methodological centre of the university

Article References: Nagymzanova, K., Abdykalykova, M., Ashimkhanova, G., Orazayeva, G., & Mazhinov, B. (2026). Model of joint integrative-organisational activity of the pedagogical department and the resource and methodological centre of the university. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 473. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01769-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01769-y

Keywords: higher education, Kazakhstan, teacher training, digital transformation, organisational model, pedagogy, educational innovation, methodological centre, university management, instructional theory, competitiveness, survey research

The initiative comes from INPACT!, a network launched in 2023 that brings together scientist-innovators, mainly grantees of the European Research Council, who have first-hand experience of trying to move fundamental discoveries toward application. The authors combined this direct experience with economic analysis of European funding programmes to identify reforms that could strengthen Europe’s ability to translate research into innovation. Among the contributors are researchers from several Italian institutions, including the Italian Institute of Technology, IMT Lucca, Politecnico di Torino, Politecnico di Milano and Università Bocconi. Gianni Ciofani, co-author of the Policy Forum and coordinator of the Italian Institute of Technology’s Center for Materials Interfaces in Pontedera, is a recipient of multiple European Research Council grants and represents the profile of researcher the paper seeks to empower.

The analysis centres on Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research and innovation programme covering 2021 to 2027. According to the authors, funding within this framework remains fragmented, and discoveries with commercial potential can fall into administrative gaps between two key instruments. European Research Council Proof of Concept grants help researchers explore practical applications of frontier science, while European Innovation Council programmes support technology development and business growth. Between these two stages, promising ideas can lose momentum because the transition requires repeated evaluations, new application procedures and shifts in governance that are difficult for individual researchers and early-stage investors to navigate.

The paper’s flagship proposal is to bring the ERC Proof of Concept grants under European Innovation Council governance, creating a more continuous pathway from scientific discovery to technology development and commercialisation. The authors argue that this restructuring could reduce repeated evaluations, simplify transitions between programmes and make support more predictable for researchers and the investors who back them. Dario Polli, professor at Politecnico di Milano and one of the lead authors of the Policy Forum, frames the problem in terms of lost momentum. Europe, he says, has extraordinary scientific talent, but too often momentum is lost between discovery and application, and what is needed is a more continuous pathway that allows promising ideas to move from fundamental research towards technologies, companies and solutions capable of generating economic and societal impact.

Beyond connecting existing programmes, the Policy Forum calls for substantially stronger support for early-stage, high-risk innovation. The combined annual funding for the European Innovation Council’s Pathfinder and Transition programmes currently stands at approximately 500 million euros, a figure the authors consider modest given the scale of the challenge, while their programme-management capacity remains limited compared with advanced research agencies in the United States. The recommendation is to reallocate resources towards breakthrough innovation and to give independent programme managers greater authority to guide promising projects, an approach inspired by models such as the United States’ ARPA-style agencies, where empowered managers can steer portfolios of risky ideas with flexibility and speed that conventional grant systems rarely allow.

Giorgio Presidente, a researcher at the Institute for European Policymaking at Bocconi University, places the funding critique in a wider economic context. Europe, he argues, is caught in a middle-technology trap: the continent specialises in mature industries such as automotive and industrial machinery, while frontier sectors such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology remain too small. To strengthen competitiveness and strategic autonomy, he contends, Europe must rebuild the pipeline from scientific discovery to market, funding the best ideas and enabling researchers and innovators to turn today’s breakthroughs into tomorrow’s high-tech industries. This framing connects the paper’s technical recommendations on grant governance to the broader political debate about Europe’s productivity and technological sovereignty.

The authors also target the administrative burden of applying for European funding. They propose that applications be shorter and assessed more directly on the substance of the idea and its potential use, rather than on extensive documentation that consumes researchers’ time without improving selection quality. In a further measure aimed at the gap between excellence and capacity, they suggest that national funding agencies make multi-year commitments to support excellent projects that successfully pass European evaluation but cannot be financed from the available European Union budget. This would extend an approach already used through the Seal of Excellence, a quality label that allows national and regional programmes to identify and fund proposals judged excellent at the European level but left unfunded due to budget limits.

A recurring theme of the paper is that Europe does not have a problem with the quality of its research; what it lacks are the conditions for that research to translate more readily into innovation and value for society. The authors argue that supporting researchers should extend beyond generating new knowledge to protecting, developing and transferring it, and that entrepreneurship and technology transfer should be recognised as fully legitimate components of the scientific mission. Ciofani emphasises the institutional dimension of this shift, noting that universities face an opportunity to rethink incentives, skills and career paths, creating an environment in which researchers who choose to turn a discovery into a technology or a new venture are supported rather than penalised in their academic careers.

Reforming European funding alone, the authors stress, will not be sufficient. Universities and technology transfer offices must also create conditions in which researchers can pursue innovation without being forced to choose between an academic career and entrepreneurship. The Policy Forum recommends greater recognition of entrepreneurship in academic careers, improved intellectual-property management and clearer routes to patents, industrial partnerships and spin-offs, together with better access to mentoring and entrepreneurial expertise. These measures address a well-documented cultural problem in European academia, where commercialisation activities have often counted little in hiring, promotion and evaluation, discouraging precisely the researchers best placed to translate frontier science into applications.

The authors are careful to note the limits of their proposals. The reforms would not by themselves resolve Europe’s wider constraints in venture capital, regulation and business expansion, all of which shape whether young companies can scale within the European market. However, they argue that a more coherent system linking scientific research, technology development and entrepreneurship could help Europe capture more of the economic and societal value generated by its research base. Amanda Silva Brun, director of research at the CNRS in France and one of the lead authors, describes the practical vision: clearer institutional pathways with well-defined steps, predictable timelines and streamlined procedures that make the entire process easier to navigate, empowering more researchers to transform knowledge into solutions for society. Embracing innovation, she suggests, can give new momentum to scientific careers, reshape how research is approached and enable scientists to play a strategic role in strengthening Europe’s global competitiveness while addressing unmet societal needs. The Policy Forum, which underwent external peer review and revision before acceptance in Science, is intended as a contribution to ongoing discussions about the design of the next generation of European research and innovation programmes, and its authors hope the perspective of scientists who have themselves attempted the journey from discovery to market will inform how those programmes are built.

Subject of Research: Proposed reforms to European Union research and innovation funding to improve commercialisation of scientific discoveries

Article Title: European researchers set out EU innovation reforms in Science

Article References: European researchers set out EU innovation reforms in Science. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: European Union, Horizon Europe, European Research Council, European Innovation Council, science policy, innovation, technology transfer, academic entrepreneurship, research funding, spin-offs, competitiveness, INPACT!