Engaging multi-stakeholder networks: School-industry-university partnership

25 September 2021

On 22th of September, iHub4Schools and SEIS (Twinning project) had a joint seminar about school-industry-university partnership models. Challenge that schools have to deal with, is the rapid development of emerging novel technologies by the educational technology industry. In most of the cases, there is a lack of systematic collaboration for introducing these technologies and finding the way to the instructional practices. Quite often such emerging technologies do not meet the needs of the educational system and there is a lack of engagement by the researchers with the practitioners to provide the research evidence and guidance.

SEIS project, in collaboration with Tallinn University, Tampere University of Applied Sciences and Bergen University aims to develop university-school-industry partnership model for co-creating and scaling up innovations in schools especially focusing on Living Labs approach for the co-creation of responsible educational research and innovation. iHub4Schools project aims to propose a framework for multi-engaging stakeholder communities of teachers, researchers, industry and policy partners.

The first joint seminar introduced the experiences in different countries in terms of collaboration models, novel methodologies and evaluation instruments. Both projects emphasize the importance of establishing systematic mechanisms and feedback loops to reach and interact with different academic and non-academic users throughout the lifetime of the project to ensure genuine interaction between research and policy/practice by bringing together academic partners with strong policy/practice orientations with Europe-wide experience of engagement with the research community. 

The next seminars will focus on the development of joint framework for multi-stakeholder networks to scale up digital innovation in schools.