Abstract:

Higher Education Institutes are transforming their visions and practices to better adopt to the digital and more connected world. This not only affects the ways HEIs are providing new learning opportunities, but also changes the role of HEIs in regional, national, and global innovation ecosystems. As Kim & Kareem (2019) accurately point out, HEIs are challenged to transform and elevate their education systems into Education 4.0, referring to an innovation-producing ecosystem, to remain relevant to industry. This kind of transformation requires building stronger relationships with the industry, but also requires cultivation of innovation culture within HEIs.

This paper provides an example from Finland and addresses how a Finnish HEI has started this journey towards Education 4.0. In beginning of 2020 two Finnish Higher Education Institutes (HEI) were merged into a one. The new established HEI aims at to become an Innovation University of Applied Sciences for working life. This requires stronger university-industry collaboration with an objective to broaden the HEIs external funding base.

With history of two different sizes of organizations with different focuses, different organizational cultures, many lines of businesses with their own subcultures, numerous practices in education, research, development, and innovation activities with stakeholder groups, a starting point for the change was complex. This article discusses, based on some qualitative data, what kind of steps towards becoming the Innovation University of Applied Sciences for working life has been taken so far, and based on the current understanding what kind of steps must be taken in the future.

So far, the discussion is based on set of qualitative data gathered to find out how concepts such as innovation, innovation process, innovation management and pedagogics needed to foster them in HEI are understood. Some previous studies have also discussed how to organize the pedagogics needed at the HEI (Juvonen & Kurvinen 2018).

Later, a set of theme-based specialist interviews will be conducted to build a more coherent picture of how these concepts mentioned above are realized, should we try to integrate them, and if yes, how could it be done.

The outcome of the article will be a first figure of Organizational Innovation ecosystem (see Grandstrand and Holgersson 2020 for more about the innovation ecosystems) that begins to describe who are the essential internal and external actors of the ecosystem, what type of resources and artifacts are needed, and what kind of activities must be set in place to enable better integration of education and RDI work between different field of businesses. These are required to achieve real collaboration and impact with the working life.

References:
[1] Grandstrand, O. & Holgersson, M. 2020. Innovation ecosystems: A conceptual review and a new definition. Techovation Vol 90-91. Available at: https://bit.ly/3qd57wJ
[2] Juvonen, P. & Kurvinen A. 2018. A Perfect Ecosystem for Learning? Modern Thoughts for Organizing Higher Education, Vol. 3, No. 1, 82-93. Available at: https://bit.ly/3q9yT5R
[3] Kin, T. M., & Kareem, O. A. (2019). School leaders’ competencies that make a difference in the era of Education 4.0: A conceptual framewor. International Journal of Academic Research Business and Social Sciences, 9(5), 214–225.

Keywords:

Higher Education Institute, innovation ecosystem, innovation culture, industry collaboration, pedagogics.