Innovation is crucial for higher education to ensure high-quality curricula that address the changing needs of students, labor markets, and society as a whole. Substantial amounts of resources and enthusiasm are devoted to innovations, but often they do not yield the desired changes. This may be due to unworkable goals, too much complexity, and a lack of resources to institutionalize the innovation. In many cases, innovations end up being less sustainable than expected or hoped for. In the long term, the disappointing revenues of innovations hamper the ability of higher education to remain future proof. Against the background of this need to increase the success of educational innovations, our colleague Klaartje van Genugten has explored the literature on innovations to reveal mechanisms that contribute to the sustainability of innovations. Her findings are synthesized in this report. They are particularly meaningful for directors of education programs, curriculum committees, educational consultants, and policy makers, who are generally in charge of defining the scope and set up of innovations. Her report offers a comprehensive view and provides food for thought on how we can strive for future-proof and sustainable innovations. I therefore recommend reading this report.
Sustainability and economic growth—the integration and balance of social, environmental, and economic needs—is a salient concern for sustainable development and social well-being. By focusing on a sustainable innovation project, we explore how entrepreneurial ecosystems become sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems and investigate the interactions of entrepreneurial actors. We conducted an inductive, single-case study of a specific collaborative innovation project in the denim industry specialized in a specific geographic location. From our data, we show that the presence of four conditional aspects foster sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems. These include sustainability orientation of actors, recognition of sustainable opportunities and resource mobilization, collaborative innovation of sustainability opportunities, and markets for sustainable products. We make two observations that contribute to the literature. First, we see that in a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurial experimentation is a highly interdependent and interactive process. Second, we see that recognition of sustainable opportunities is distributed among different actors in the ecosystem. Our findings also have implications for practitioners and policy-makers.
How can the grower and the supplier in the greenhouse horticulture industry gain competitive advantage through radical innovation? The challenge lies in time- to-market, in customer relationship, in developing new product/market combinations and in innovative entrepreneurship. Realizing this ambition requires strengthening the knowledge base, stimulating innovation, entrepreneurship and education. It also requires professionalizing people. In this paper an innovation and entrepreneurial educational and research programme is introduced. This KITE120-programme aims at strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration between enterprise, education and research. It helps making the step from ambition to action, and from incremental to radical innovation. We call this an 'Amazing Jump'.
