Abstract: HEInnovate was used within the U!REKA Alliance to assess institutional strengths and identify areas for development across 7 partner universities. The process revealed both strengths and weaknesses among members, fostering valuable peer learning and supporting the alignment of development priorities. HEInnovate proved to be a practical tool for guiding collaboration and capacity-building in support of the alliance’s shared goals.
Could you share some background about your current work and responsibilities?
I am Mona Roman, working as a Director of Research at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and being a lead coordinator of the U!REKA Alliance. Furthermore, I am part of the HEInnovate expert group.
Can you tell us about the collaborative initiative you’re involved in that aims to address current societal and urban challenges?
The Metropolia University of Applied Sciences is a coordinator of the European University Alliance U!REKA with a consortium of 30 partners. The strategic focus of this Alliance is on climate neutral and smart cities. We bring together cities, regions, higher education institutions and other key stakeholders working on the green and digital transition. U!REKA envisions an inclusive and connected inter-university campus that empowers learners to tackle pressing societal and urban challenges through co-creation and innovation.
How have you used the HEInnovate tool within your institution or network?
As part of the U!REKA university alliance, we were looking for a structured way to assess our institutional strengths and identify areas where we could grow together. That’s when we turned to HEInnovate. Each partner institution carried out a self-assessment using the HEInnovate tool. For us, it wasn’t just about checking boxes—it was about planning our approach for sharing best practices and knowledge transfer on the different dimension on entrepreneurial and innovation activities at our HEIs.
What insights did the HEInnovate self-assessment provide for your alliance? 
The self-assessment helped us identify where our alliance is strong: particularly in Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Networks, as well as Leadership and Governance. These results gave us confidence that we have a solid foundation to build on. At the same time, the self-assessment revealed dimensions where we saw room for development. Organisational Capacity, Digital Transformation and Capability, and Impact of the Entrepreneurial HEI stood out as weaker areas across the alliance. We didn’t see this as a problem—rather, it gave us a clear direction for competence-building and collaboration.
Of course, interpreting the results required a degree of cultural and institutional sensitivity. Some universities were naturally more modest or critical in their self-assessments, while others were more optimistic. That’s perfectly okay—the goal was never to rank partners against one another. Instead, we focused on understanding each institution’s context, strengths, and development needs, and to use the results to see where each partner has their strengths.
Can you describe how your alliance translated the HEInnovate findings into concrete development activities?
Our alliance received EIT Higher Education Initiative funding for U!Innovate project, which is fully structured based on the self-assessment results, focusing on the dimensions where our alliances have most significant development needs. Furthermore, the partners with the highest scores in the alliance overall weak dimensions were appointed to lead the related tasks. Our business partners have a key role to support us in U!Innovate project to establish our comprehensive joint entrepreneurship education and incubator services. Overall, the self-assessment thus gave us solid bases to systematically develop entrepreneurship and innovation competences at our 7 partner HEIs¹.
How do you plan to use HEInnovate in the future to support your alliance’s development?
We plan to repeat the HEInnovate self-assessment in 2027 to see how far we’ve come both as individual institutions and as an alliance. This will be a first time for us being able to analyse our alliance through the HEInnovate self-assessment. As I often say, a full alliance-wide picture of our entrepreneurial capacity will only be meaningful once our joint initiatives—like a shared entrepreneurship curriculum and a common incubator programme—are in place.
How would you describe the value of HEInnovate for institutional or alliance-wide development?
I can only recommend other European Universities alliances to use HEInnovate self-assessment tool to identify the strengths and the potential areas for improvement at their member universities. For U!REKA, HEInnovate is more than a diagnostic—it’s a compass.
¹ The 7 partner HEIs are: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, HOGENT University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Polytechnic University of Lisbon, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava and Odessa National Economic University.
Photo by Monique Kooijmans.