SVEUCILISTE U RIJECI-TEHNICKI FAKULTET

Their core work

The Technical Faculty of the University of Rijeka (RITEH) is an engineering school in Croatia's main port city, covering disciplines such as mechanical, electrical, and naval engineering. Their H2020 involvement has been strictly as a third party — meaning they contributed capacity, infrastructure, or expertise to projects without holding formal participant status or receiving direct EU funding. In EUROCC, they served as Croatia's node for building national high-performance computing competence and skills pipelines connecting academia and industry. In YUFERING, they participated as part of the YUFE (Young Universities for the Future of Europe) alliance, contributing to structural reforms in how universities manage research, transfer knowledge, and engage with society.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

RITEH's H2020 engagement spans only 2020–2024, which is too short for a meaningful long-term evolution story. Their first project (EUROCC, 2020) was anchored in practical computing infrastructure — HPC competence centres, skills development, and industry connectivity. Their second project (YUFERING, 2021) shifted toward institutional and policy territory: R&I agenda reform, open science, and rewarding researchers, reflecting the YUFE alliance's focus on transforming how European universities operate. The direction suggests RITEH is moving from technical capacity-building toward broader engagement with how research is valued, organized, and disseminated — but with only two data points, this is a tentative signal rather than an established pattern.

RITEH appears to be expanding from technical infrastructure roles toward participation in European university reform networks, which may open paths into Horizon Europe missions around research assessment and open science.

How they like to work

RITEH has participated exclusively as a third party — the lightest formal engagement level in EU projects — meaning they contribute without bearing full project obligations or receiving direct funding. Their apparent network of 118 partners across 33 countries reflects the scale of the consortia they joined (EUROCC alone spans 30+ European countries), not their own networking activity. This suggests they are accessible, low-friction partners who can attach to large European networks without requiring lead-partner commitment from the other side.

RITEH is nominally connected to 118 partners across 33 countries, but this breadth comes from two large-scale European network projects (EUROCC and YUFE) rather than from bilateral relationships. Their direct collaboration footprint is almost certainly much smaller and concentrated within Croatia and the Adriatic-Central European region.

What sets them apart

RITEH is one of the few technical faculties in Croatia with traceable involvement in both the European HPC competence network and the YUFE university alliance — two quite different European ecosystems. For a consortium builder needing a Croatian technical university with demonstrated links to both computing infrastructure and research reform networks, RITEH offers a lightweight entry point that does not require large contractual overhead. Their port-city location in Rijeka also gives natural proximity to maritime, logistics, and industrial engineering sectors underrepresented in most Central European consortia.

Highlights from their portfolio

• EUROCC
  Part of the pan-European EuroHPC initiative to build national HPC competence centres, connecting computing infrastructure to industrial and academic users across 30+ countries.
• YUFERING
  Embedded RITEH within the YUFE alliance of 10 European universities, targeting structural transformation of how research and innovation is governed and transferred across borders.