transformation through innovation and cooperation in communities

With the project "TrICo - Transformation through Innovation and Cooperation in Communities", Leuphana is pursuing the goal of establishing four communities on the topics of "Sustainable Production", "School Development and Leadership", "Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship", and "Art and Culture". The communities are intended to help successfully manage the upcoming major social transformation processes and significantly improve innovation and transfer activities in the Hamburg metropolitan region and in Lower Saxony. With their focus on socially relevant issues and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary groups of entrepreneurs, decision-makers, experts and scientists, the communities offer special potential for long-term and open technological and social innovation processes. 

The four communities are supported by the mobile "Leuphana Media Studio", which develops and implements hybrid event and media formats to increase the reach of knowledge transfer and science communication. An integrated "community and impact management" supports the development and testing of impact-oriented communities and multidirectional learning processes with practice partners across the board. Based on this, a trend-setting and transferable cooperation model for inter- and transdisciplinary community building and open innovation for small and medium-sized universities will be developed. 

Direct cooperation partners of the project are the Helmholtz Center Hereon, the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and the Ubuntu Social Impact Lab GmbH. In the communities, cooperation takes place with numerous other partners such as art and cultural institutions, schools, non-profit organizations and institutes from the fields of education and social entrepreneurship, as well as with companies, regional business development institutions, chambers and innovation centers. 

With the establishment of the "Sustainable Production" community, Leuphana is pursuing the goal of contributing to the socially urgent and politically forced sustainability transformation of companies. The topic of "sustainable production" is made accessible to companies in the community through research-based knowledge transfer and is addressed in innovative cooperation formats. The focus of the community's activities is on the CO2-neutral transformation of strategies, production and individual technical processes through a holistic view of the life cycle of ecologically compatible, technically feasible and economically viable products and processes that conserve resources.

With the establishment of the community "School Improvement and Leadership", Leuphana pursues the goal of supporting the current transformation and future challenges in school improvement together with decision-makers and managers from schools, educational institutions and both partners from business and public administration. The partners with their respective previous experiences are enabled to exchange existing knowledge in the community and to acquire new knowledge, especially regarding the areas of (inclusive) pedagogy, leadership in the sense of "Leadership for Learning" as well as information and communication technology.

With the community "Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship", Leuphana contributes to the development of social innovations for societal transformation processes. The aim is to generate, scale and diffuse social innovations in the Lüneburg region and the Hamburg metropolitan region by involving decision-makers and innovators in the community. The concept of social innovations captures innovations in products, processes or organizational forms that are developed in exchange with societal actors for the solution of societal grand challenges, such as climate change or new forms of mobility and work.

The community Art and Culture takes as its main objective to study and co-design transformation processes in artistic and cultural institutions. Through the systematic expansion and consolidation of regional and supra-regional cooperations between research and practice, a lively community of decision-makers, initiators, artists and students will be created. The focus of the project is to promote organizational change by developing and testing new organizational formats and processes together with cooperation partners. In addition to the development of the community as a structural measure, several implementation activities such as exhibitions, experimental series, conferences, and media formats will be produced.

The Leuphana Media Studio will be established under the direction of Prof. Dr. Paul Drews in collaboration with Olaf Krafft (AVM Service) and Andrea Japsen (Cooperation Service). With the Leuphana Media Studio, Leuphana is pursuing the goal of further developing its approach to digital knowledge transfer and thereby increasing the reach of its cooperation and transfer activities. In this media studio, content-curated formats on socially relevant topics from research and transfer are professionally produced, published, and made permanently available. The professional equipment for video production as well as the qualified project team enable the creation of videos on cooperation and transfer activities both at Leuphana and mobile at cooperation partners in the region. The media studio also supports the creation of smaller multimedia content such as podcasts, demo or pitch videos and short videos on current topics and accompanies and documents the digital and hybrid events in the TriCo project.

The "Central Community- and Impact-Management" is responsible for the overall project controlling, the community and impact management and for the central event and communication management. The goal of this sub-project is to develop and evaluate an innovative cooperation model for inter- and transdisciplinary community building and open innovation with the four communities. By establishing a systematic impact orientation at Leuphana, recommendations and approaches for the accompaniment of transformation processes by universities are to be developed and tested regarding their effectiveness. The central event and communication management takes on the task of disseminating research findings in a reflected manner in digital and hybrid as well as presence formats at the intersection between science, social interests, and political action. This sub-project supports the project TrICo in the scientific and operational implementation of the project as well as in the communication with the project executing agency.