On 30 June 2026, the COIIN project held the webinar Intergenerational Organisational Culture in Research Centres and Research Teams at Spanish Universities. The event brought together researchers from different universities to reflect on the challenges and opportunities arising from the coexistence of different generations within university research teams.
The project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and is coordinated by CRiEDO members and professors David Rodríguez Gómez and Diego Castro Ceacero.
In the opening session, David Rodríguez highlighted that university research environments bring together people at different stages of their academic careers, ranging from predoctoral researchers to emeritus professors. This diversity represents a strategic asset that fosters mutual learning, innovation and knowledge transfer.
The keynote address was delivered by Professor Ulrike Fasbender (University of Hohenheim, Germany), one of the leading international scholars in the field of age diversity in the workplace. She presented the first findings of an international research project on intergenerational friendships at work, showing that trusting relationships between people of different ages promote empathy, mutual understanding, knowledge sharing and supportive behaviours among colleagues.
The subsequent discussion reinforced one of the project’s central ideas: the importance of fostering organisational cultures that facilitate intergenerational relationships. Both Professor Fasbender and the participants agreed that universities can encourage meaningful opportunities for interaction, promote collaboration across generations and reduce age-based segregation, which often occurs implicitly in academic environments.
The second part of the webinar featured Amaia Eiguren Munitis and Naiara Berasategui Sancho, researchers from the KideON research group at the University of the Basque Country. They presented a range of qualitative and creative methodologies for studying intergenerational relationships, including drawings, spontaneous narratives, life lines and reflective diaries. These approaches make it possible to explore the emotional and experiential dimensions of interpersonal relationships, which are often difficult to capture through more conventional data collection techniques.
The session concluded with a discussion on the potential of these methodologies for analysing relationships between researchers of different ages within universities, an area of particular relevance to the objectives of the COIIN project.
With this first webinar, the COIIN project strengthens its role as a platform for reflection and knowledge exchange on intergenerational organisational culture, contributing to the development of more inclusive, collaborative universities that are better equipped to harness the value of generational diversity.
The webinar recording is available to watch here.
