Team members of E.I.N.S., the E³UDRES² Entrepreneurship and Innovation Network for Smart and Sustainable European Regions, made their way to Bologna from 30 November to 02 December 2022 to participate in a Sense-Making Workshop offered by the EIT HEI Initiative, the funding body of the project.
The workshop allowed the numerous international participants to find a wide range of new possibilities and solutions to the projects' challenges. Together, they identified different ways to formulate and achieve project goals, from the vision to the daily milestones. E.I.N.S. project lead Malgorzata Goraczek of St. Pölten UAS and Iveta Putnina of Vidzeme UAS spent the two extensively designed days networking, looking beyond the E.I.N.S. project - and becoming a living part of the EIT innovation community in Europe. With a total of 23 HEI Initiative projects and their teams participating, the time spent together was intensively invested in building a community for innovation and entrepreneurship. With a lot of knowledge and fun, the EIT HEI project teams were able to present activities and results that made it possible to see the big picture of the HEI initiative. Synergy effects arose naturally as experiences and challenges were shared.
Rich in results and experiences
The Sense-Making workshop produced a range of outcomes:
Planning the direction of future activities and collaborations,
the use of common resources,
learning from proven cases and solutions, and above all,
an answer to the question of how to continue and improve the outcomes and impact of capacity building for innovation and entrepreneurship.
"What kind of change in European higher education do we want to bring about with E.I.N.S.?", asks Malgorzata Goraczek now - just arriving back at St. Pölten UAS. And she can give the answer right away: "First of all, we start with ourselves and examine what institutional changes would support a stronger entrepreneurial mindset at universities - and what our students and researchers need to make a difference in our regions." Iveta Putnina of Vidzeme UAS adds: "Then we look for partnerships outside of universities to share existing knowledge and research findings." The ultimate aim of E.I.N.S. is to establish six Open Innovation Hubs in the six partnering E³UDRES² countries to provide a platform for joint international collaboration between universities and companies.
