The Universities for deep tech and entrepreneurship (UNITeD) project aims to empower consortium universities’ interdisciplinary approaches as one of their strategic domains, in order to flexibly reconfigure the universities’ entrepreneurial and innovation capacity to respond to the human resources and research and development (R&D)-based needs of deep tech industries operating within Nordic-Baltic innovation value chains.

The UNITeD Project has three main objectives:

• Strengthening entrepreneurial and interdisciplinary approaches within HEIs;
• Enhancing innovative and entrepreneurial education;
• Exploring partnerships for innovation.

Consortium partners are strategically committed to devote effort to transforming their academic curricula and research agendas by pro-actively exploring university-business partnerships in the field of deep tech. When enhancing the supply of new entrepreneurship- and deep tech-focused study forms and curricula, offering pre-incubation activities for university-related start-ups and teams of students and researchers, opening avenues for active partnership engagement activities with deep tech companies, consortium universities‘ students, academic and non-academic personnel, will be highly involved.

The spectrum of Project actions is expected to make institutional change through awareness raising on the potential of interdisciplinary approaches within study and research areas, and the importance of both entrepreneurship and the applicability of university-based R&D solutions, and the intermediating role of knowledge and technology transfer processes. A more systematic and organised approach towards smart blending of the study and research domains is anticipated, to enhance the competitiveness of deep tech-focused industries, and consequently create impetus for societal wellbeing.

The Project consortium consists of five Baltic universities:

• Vilnius University (LT);
• Tallinn University of Technology (EE);
• Tartu University (EE);
• Tallinn University (EE);
• Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (LV).

And one Nordic university:

• University of Jyväskylä (FI).

The consortium universities already have rich experience in providing entrepreneurial education, organising pre-incubation activities to spin-out innovative ideas, and suggesting new R&D solutions to the industry to be further developed and applied on the market. The UNITeD Project unites the Nordic-Baltic university forces to further jointly explore interdisciplinary approaches within the study process, and also R&D activities as one of the key enabling domains unlocking the potential to adjust the study and research endeavours according to changing deep tech industry needs.

The consortium’s associated partners, Enterprise Estonia (EE), Baltic Sandbox Ventures (LT), Latvian Startup Association (LV) and Startup Factory (FI), joined the Project with the aim to further extend the possibilities for deep tech-focused university-related entrepreneurial teams and start-ups to access the ‘one-stop-shop’ Nordic-Baltic innovation support ecosystem and venture capital.

Project coordinator

Kristina Babelytė-Labanauskė, Head of Innovation Office, Vilnius University (contact)