The future of European competitiveness requires higher education institutes (HEIs) to develop linkages with businesses and establish incentives for researchers to become entrepreneurs, as stated in the recent report by Mario Draghi. Moreover, growing challenges such as climate change are changing the world we live in. The vision of U!Innovate for 2030 is to boost European competitiveness in the domain of climate-neutral and smart cities through strengthening entrepreneurial and innovation competences at our HEIs to become true entrepreneurial universities. We envision that through participation in the HEI Initiative and implementation of our Innovation Vision Action Plan (IVAP) we will be recognized in 2030 for excellence in:

1) Educating, training and mentoring future entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Our goal is to propel European innovation forward by fostering the creation of new startups and transforming business models within established companies
2) Engaging and incentivizing staff and students to commercialize and upscale their innovative ideas into businesses, particularly those contributing to climate neutrality, circular economy and citizen engagement.
3) Supporting our partners from public sector and SMEs and to achieve the goals for climate-neutral and smart cities. We aim to create new synergies among the wide diversity of local ecosystems and geographical locations in our alliance through setting up a joint hybrid inter-regional incubator.

The U!Innovate HEI partners from Belgium, Czechia, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal and Ukraine are members of U!REKA European University alliance. The U!REKA alliance has established joint knowledge-creating community for inter-regional collaboration. We intend to develop at least 500 new solutions for climate-neutrality that are orchestrated by our students and staff. However, we still lack common processes for commercialization of these solutions, and upscaling them across Europe. Through U!Innovate we will create joint entrepreneurship and innovation services and institutional capabilities, required to commercialize, scale up and replicate the 500 solutions and beyond. U!Innovate business partners has a crucial role to trainee-the-trainees at our HEIs and strengthen business linkages. EURASHE as European network for applied HEIs is responsible of leading the wider communication, dissemination and exploitation of U!Innovate project.

As a result of the 25 months of U!Innovate project, we aim to have educated, trained and mentored 1200 students and 340 staff members through our joint education portfolio, summer schools and climathons, and supported 18 start-ups and the establishment of 4 start-ups in collaboration with business partners and EIT KICs, and integrated our jointly established hybrid inter-regional incubator in the structures and collaboration of U!REKA European University for its sustainability beyond the project life-time.

Project coordinator

Antti Laurikainen, Metropolia Ammattikorkeakoulu (contact)