Turning research networks into lasting real-world impact

The Greek Scientists Society (GSS) is a non-profit organisation originated in Cambridge, UK in December 2020, reaching 30,000 members in just two years. Its mission is to support scientific communities across Greece, Cyprus, and the Diaspora, and to advance a Greek scientific paradigm: the inheritance of ancient Greek thought, whose ethical inquiry, reasoned argument, and pursuit of knowledge for its own sake shaped the values Western science still works by. In practice this means work grounded in ethics and open to innovation at once: treating the translation of science into policy and real-world application as a structured practice rather than an afterthought.

Since then we have built a set of platforms, events, and services to support the research community, developed and funded from our own resources and offered to research networks at no cost.

GSS connects today more than 33,000 scientists and technologists worldwide, across academia, industry, clinical practice, public institutions, and policy.

Since September 2024, the Society has migrated this model from a primarily Greek frame to a European one, on the view that translation, regulatory relevance, and post-research uptake are addressed most effectively at European scale. The COST Association, with its emphasis on networking and excellence, has proved to be the natural environment for this work: a structure where research communities, stakeholder bodies, and policy actors already share the same table.

The GSS presence on LinkedIn carries much of the community's day-to-day exchange, and is the quickest route to a scientific audience across academia, industry, and policy. Our group brings together Greek researchers, industry practitioners, and policy actors who follow developments across disciplines rather than within a single field.

We are glad to share an Action's news and outputs there, along with its calls for events, new members, and job placements, which reach an audience already oriented toward European research and its uptake.

The platforms, the tools, and the team all serve a way of working. Most stakeholder engagement in research networks follows a familiar pattern: meeting, discussion, report, archive. Outputs accumulate but rarely reach the channels where decisions are made, because engagement is organised as a series of events rather than as a sequence with a destination.

From Mapping to Impact is a stakeholder impact methodology developed for COST Actions, built on one principle: from MoU to Legacy. Each stage produces a defined output that feeds the next, carrying an Action from its founding stakeholder mapping through analysis, calibrated outreach, and co-developed policy products, to institutional embedding and post-Action continuity.

The objective is not participation but structured co-development, policy translation, and long-term legacy. It adapts to an Action's grant period, Working Groups, and level of policy ambition, working as readily for an Action focused on a single Directive review as for one operating across several regulatory layers.

The full architecture, the seven steps, and worked applications across Actions are set out on the framework page.

The methodology is opened up to the wider COST community through a webinar-to-action series. Session 1 introduced the architecture.

What follows is a plan rather than a programme. The intention is that the thematic sessions are co-developed with the COST Actions whose work sits at the centre of each theme, rather than delivered as pre-designed content. Nothing beyond Session 1 has been fixed: the themes, the schedule, and the sub-series will take shape around the Actions that choose to take part.

Working together on a grant application

If an Action or its partners are preparing a submission and would like GSS involved, the short form alongside registers the interest and the call in question, and we follow up from there.

We would be very glad to host any capacity-building activity, virtual event, or community session organised by an Action on our event platform, entirely with our compliments.

The platform supports a wide range of formats, from workshops and community meetups to industry roundtables, exhibition arenas, town halls, and hackathons, each designed for a particular kind of engagement. Beyond format diversity, it offers advanced networking capabilities that allow researchers, policymakers, regulators, innovators, and stakeholder representatives to exchange ideas as equals, sitting at the same table.

Securing funding

When exploitation produces a spin-off rather than a paper, the question becomes who would fund it. InvestorScout shortens the search for suitable investors for spin-offs, spin-outs, and follow-up ventures. It complements the grant route through the Funding Gateway: one for public funding, the other for private. We provide the contacts at no cost, and where useful we take part in securing the funding rather than handing over a list.

Hiring

Exploitation is staffed before it is financed, from the post-doc who carries the research forward, to co-founders for a startup idea, to the team a venture hires as it scales. Each draws a wide international field that has to be narrowed. Interviewer.ai runs structured AI video interviews, giving a consistent, comparable first round for labs, university groups, research infrastructures, ventures, and PASP entities, and equally for student admissions and evaluations. Fees may apply for this solution only, depending on our own charge for it.

A VNS example structured as a Strategic Collaboration Liaison across Working Groups, from the OneHealthDrugs Action. The liaison sits between the Working Groups rather than downstream of them, so dissemination and valorisation are shaped while the science is still moving, instead of being handled once results are already fixed.