Following the receipt of funding from U21, an interest group has been set up by the Universities of Auckland, Glasgow and Melbourne, supported initially by UBC and Lund University around the theme of research universities and their regional engagement. The focus of U 21’s mission is on educational development, mobility of students and every category of staff, research and knowledge transfer and the core systems and processes that support such activity; the work of this group will feed into the development of this mission.

This document is the report of a first meeting of the group hosted at the University of Melbourne in March 2010 following a number of informal discussions and meetings. All other U21 universities were invited and that resulted in attendance by a representative of the University of Queensland. The meeting also benefited from the attendance of representatives of RMIT Melbourne and Helsinki City, involved centrally in the PASCAL Observatory’s PURE project at the University of Glasgow, which was the stimulus for the initiation of the network, and whose methodologies will in part inform the work of the group. In Appendix 2, detail of the PURE project is provided.

Participation by the other member institutions of U21 will be invited in the future and they will be encouraged to play a role in the further concretization of the agenda of the group and in the refinement of its work plan.

The purpose of the group is to drive excellence and innovation in regional engagement through discovering the means by which global universities engage most effectively with their geographical regions for mutual benefit and added value.

The aim is to discover how best and in what form a commitment to Regional Engagement by U21 members can:

• Meet economic, social, cultural, environmental needs;
• Enhance the learning, research and engagement agenda of the University; and
• Benefit both the university and the community.

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