Key results of the HEInnovate Arqus self-assessment

The Arqus European University Alliance, through its Action Line 5, aims to encourage entrepreneurship and creativity throughout the entire university community, including students, academic and administrative staff.

As a first step, the Alliance aims to develop a roadmap of mutually beneficial activities through the adoption of a shared and coherent approach to entrepreneurship among the universities.

All seven Arqus universities completed the HEInnovate self-assessment to obtain a good level of understanding of their current local situation. After local level analysis, an Arqus level action planning workshop was organised on the 14th June 2021 with moderators Mikkel Trym – Director of CIEL, Denmark and Zsuzsa Javorka – principal consultant at Technopolis Group.

The aim was to initiate the elaboration of a joint roadmap using the accumulative 210 self-assessments dataset coupled with the results of the individual institutional analysis. 42 participants from key internal university stakeholder groups (students, administrative staff, academic faculty, upper management, TTOs…) participated in the half-day online workshop.

Key results of the analysed self-assessment completions illustrated a high degree of complementarity across the universities and highlighted the potential for transferability of good practices within Arqus.

During the workshop, four priority areas were identified and discussed:
•    Governance: Creating high-level recognition – getting the senior leadership of Arqus universities on board
•    Organisational capacity – what are the existing good practices, how to identify and collect them?
•    Entrepreneurial Teaching and Learning – how to create interdisciplinary courses?
•    Knowledge exchange – how to enhance regional engagement and industry collaboration?  

Small working groups were formed to develop four individual action plans that were discussed in plenum. These roadmaps were then combined into a common draft roadmap as a takeaway from the workshop to help further develop Arqus activities.

Smita Mohanty, Université de Lyon.