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.

 

Project duration: 1 April 2025 – 31 December 2025 (First phase), 1 January 2026 – 30 April 2027 (Second phase)

 

Find out more on the  project website

 

U!Innovate is a project supervised by the U!REKA Center of Expertise „Innovative Governance Models and Citizen Engagement“.