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U!Innovate – an EIT HEI Initiative enhancing European competitiveness through innovation in higher education

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) strengthens European higher education through its flagship programme, the Higher Education Initiative (HEI). The UInnovate project running from 2025 to 2027, fosters climate-neutral, smart cities via collaboration across seven countries. 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. It supports 500 climate solutions, trains 1,200 students and 340 staff, and strengthens industry-academia ties.

CLIC as a business partner and expert on connecting and facilitating innovation ecosystems, supporting knowledge triangle integration for sustainable solutions, has in the U!Innovate project a key role to connect with SMEs for them to benefit of the U!Innovate incubator services, and large corporations for funding start-ups/scale-ups and to benefit of their innovations. This type of partnership fosters transnational innovation ecosystems and knowledge triangle.

Objectives

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.

Partners

Read more on the project website!

Contact

Aila Maijanen

Aila Maijanen

Head of Bioeconomy, currently also Executive Officer for IBC Finland ry

Tel. +358 50 375 1182

aila.maijanen(at)clicinnovation.fi