Leveraging Your Network

Research careers depend on relationships. Collaborations, co-authorships, funding opportunities, career moves, peer review, industry connections — all of these flow through networks. Yet for many researchers, reaching out to someone in a different department, institution or sector feels deeply uncomfortable.

There are real reasons for this. Academic culture rewards individual expertise and often punishes what looks like self-promotion. Many researchers feel their work should speak for itself. Asking for help can feel like an admission of weakness. And the idea of "networking" often carries associations with superficial small talk and transactional behaviour that feels inauthentic.

The result is that talented researchers operate in smaller circles than they need to. They miss collaborations because they did not know who to approach. They miss opportunities because they never asked. And they stay within departmental boundaries that feel safe and quietly limit their impact.

This is sharper still in a new or merging institute, where people are suddenly surrounded by potential collaborators they have not yet built relationships with. The question is rarely whether those connections are valuable — it is how to initiate them without it feeling forced.

Participants practise the actual behaviours that make professional relationships work — in a safe, low-stakes environment where they can experiment without consequence.

• Initiating contact with someone they do not know — how to start a conversation at a conference, in a corridor, or after a seminar, without a prepared script
• Asking for help without feeling like a burden — reframing requests as invitations to collaborate rather than admissions of inadequacy
• The art of the follow-up — what to say after a first meeting to turn a brief encounter into a lasting professional relationship
• Listening for opportunities in everyday conversations — noticing when someone mentions a problem, a project or a question where your expertise might be relevant
• Crossing boundaries — approaching people from different departments, seniority levels or disciplines with curiosity rather than hesitation

Everything is practised live, with real scenarios from the participants' own professional context. We use exercises from Applied Improv that train active listening, spontaneous response and the ability to be genuinely present in a conversation, rather than mentally rehearsing what to say next.

• Practical confidence in approaching unfamiliar people in professional settings — the kind that comes from having done it repeatedly in the session, not from memorising an approach
• A personal "connection style" — an understanding of how they naturally build relationships, and how to lean into that rather than trying to be someone they are not
• Three to five concrete new contacts among the participants that they did not have before the session — the exercises create these connections naturally
• A set of small, repeatable behaviours they can use immediately — at the seminar dinner, in the weeks afterwards, and in any professional setting going forward

Many research institutes bring together people from different departments, research traditions and professional cultures. Building bridges between them is an institutional priority, not just a nice idea. This session gives participants a direct, lived experience of what it feels like to reach across those boundaries — in a way that feels natural rather than performative.

Our experience across Danish research institutions bears this out. At the Neuroscience Academy Denmark, we have seen cross-institutional connections formed during our trainings lead to co-authored papers, shared lab access and collaborative grant applications — outcomes that would not have happened without the initial human connection. And our corporate work with organisations like Novo Nordisk, BASF and Airbus reinforces the same insight: the technical quality of the work is rarely the bottleneck. The ability to connect, collaborate and communicate across silos is.