On the 8th of October 2020 the webinar “Innovate regions through cooperation” took place in the framework of the European Week of the Regions and Cities. The webinar has been organised by the European Commission and focused on the importance of developing collaboration among Higher education institutions, regional authorities and other stakeholders to support regional development.
EURASHE Secretary General Michal Karpíšek presented a project “UASiMAP – mapping regional engagement of Universities of Applied Sciences”. UASiMAP project aims to develop a self-reflection tool which will measure UAS local engagement and development of their further strategies. The project also promotes and communicates higher education institutions’ contribution to society and regional community, based on the experience and insights of key stakeholders from across the whole European Union and collects a several good practices of successful UAS engagement on the local level.
Michal Karpíšek underlined the crucial role of HEIs in supporting regional development and in designing and implementing Smart Specialisation Strategies and how important could be the use of HEInnovate to support this process. He highlighted the importance of improving the collaboration among HEIs and regional actors, even more in this particular moment, to face and recover from the current crisis.
“Higher education institutions should play in the future a more eminent role in regional social and economic development. This may be even more crucial within the recovery from the pandemic crisis. We need to release this capacity both through internal institutional policies, as well as necessary framework, tools and incentives and raised awareness of various partners’ potential. This includes the development of a set of suitable impact and performance indicators, as well as building on existing self-assessment tools like HE Innovate”, – said M. Karpíšek.
The recorded video of the webinar is available here.
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