Lessons learnt: Learning from others
The BSUIN project brings together completely different underground laboratories and each acting under very individual conditions. This uniqueness in particular is a challenge when forming a unifying network and requires to question our own thinking. But at the same moment, this uniqueness is also a strength if experts from diverse fields are brought together.
Physicists, engineers, business, and marketing specialists – can they successfully cooperate? And even more: can we learn from each other?
Yes, we can and the BSUIN project is a great example of this fruitful collaboration.
Diversity in expertise in the BSUIN project
Within the BSUIN projects we bring together great variety of experts. The main idea is to build a strong and sustainable network of underground laboratories and prepare them for future challenges by improving their service offering portfolio, and also to strengthen the (economical) interconnection between the Baltic countries.
In the modern world, we are all used to communicate with a variety of different people with different backgrounds and tasks. In the case of the underground laboratories, it was very interesting to look from the technical side how other mines work: What drives them? What regulations do they have to cope with? What is their research focus? How do they acquire new projects?
This knowledge helps to reflect about everyone’s situation and thus opens up new ways and perspectives for the future and in particular for future collaboration.
But maybe the most important factor about the BSUIN project is not only the networking amongst underground laboratories, but more so the combination with a different set of people: So, we have physicists, engineers AND business experts and this really makes the difference.
We are all willing to learn a common language to understand each other and not only talk in subject specific language. This is forcing ourselves to express our main ideas in a way that others can and want to follow us. Consequently, we train to be precise and concentrate our work to the core. But also, this involves listening closely to others which is often even more important. If we feel welcome, our minds are open, and we can learn. We learnt a variety of valuable things, such as new methods, new insights into other subjects, new interesting places and we got to know inspiring people. Business experts got to know the technical world of underground laboratories and associated research, whereas engineers learnt to do business analysis and develop marketing strategies.
Inspirations for a complex world
These inspirations constantly made us act as a whole team, profiting from diverse expertise. Thus, the fruitful BSUIN collaboration leads to stronger underground laboratories but also more knowledgeable individuals.
In a complex and rapidly changing world, we need to learn from others, particularly from a different culture, let it be expertise, nation or problem-solving approach. Within the BSUIN project we had the great opportunity to combine all these and learn from each other. This enables us to be open-minded, and thus foster the future development of the Baltic Sea Region.
Vera Lay
Dipl. Geophysicist, TU Bergakademie Freiberg
Toni Müller
Dipl.-Ing., TU Bergakademie Freiberg
Lessons Learnt blogs are written by BSUIN project members. They write about lessons they have learnt about international collaboration, Baltic Sea cultural heritage as well as co-creation in multinational and multidisciplinary teams.
