Innovative university: Leuphana establishes four innovation communities

Professor Drews, what is the great potential of the Innovative University?

The Innovative University is a program that was launched parallel to the Excellence Initiative. It is aimed in particular at small and medium-sized universities and universities of applied sciences and their potential to collaborate with business and society. In essence, this is what is known as transfer or third mission. Leuphana has had a professional cooperation service for some time now. This is not a matter of course; other universities are still building up these structures. We are already operating at a high level in transfer. Therefore, when developing the transfer strategy, we asked ourselves: What is the "next level" for us?

What does the next level of transfer look like?

The transfer strategy formulates a whole series of goals for knowledge transfer. In addition to the many individual projects that run for two or three years, we want to create a potentially self-supporting and long-term structure through which we can repeatedly develop collaborations and projects with partners. This gave rise to the idea of the Leuphana Innovation Communities. Two to six professorships with their research focus and expertise form the core of these communities. We want to establish self-supporting and impact-oriented innovation communities for our key research areas. In the Innovative University, these are Sustainable Production, School Development and Leadership, Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Art and Culture. Our model is potentially transferable to other areas: We want to find out how universities today can successfully build long-term collaborations with relevant stakeholders in companies, organizations, administration and society. The communities are designed to be open so that other stakeholders can join.

What does impact orientation mean?

We document the impact a project has had after a few years. In our project, however, we ask right at the beginning what we can achieve at the end: What are the potential impacts that we want to achieve? We talk about overarching community and impact management with active, strategic impact development. We develop the impact goals together with the members of the communities. The impact achieved in the project should be documented and presented in the media so that others can also benefit from our experiences.

So the Innovation Communities aim to strengthen cooperation opportunities between science and practice?

In collaborations, we have the opportunity to experience a real multilateral exchange of knowledge: We bring problems from society and the economy into the university and work together with companies, schools, creative artists and other stakeholders to find a solution. The communities are not an end in themselves. We want to move away from the idea that we, as a university, have the knowledge and share it with business and society. We are moving towards each other and want to promote the idea of community and cooperation. We meet with start-ups, students and founders and offer platforms where entrepreneurs, cultural workers and representatives from education, for example, can meet to network and help each other. Knowledge is exchanged and many new ideas are generated.

How important is social impact for the success of a university?

Impact already plays a major role at British universities. There universities are not only measured by their output, i.e. their publication performance, but also by their long-term impact on society. This impact can be measured quantitatively: Scientists have developed a drug and saved the lives of 300,000 people. But the impact can also be qualitative: Researchers have developed a strategy with a company or promoted the development of new products. In Germany, the discussion about impact is still in its infancy. However, we expect this to change. Universities receive a lot of funding from taxes. That is why we will probably have to explain more often in future how we use funds and what impact our research has on the economy and society: Have more jobs been created? How has satisfaction at schools increased because people have worked with us on new concepts? Do SMEs create more innovation thanks to us?

How do you bring the findings of the "Innovative University" to society?

In collaboration with the media service, we have set up a new media studio that is essentially geared towards digital and hybrid knowledge transfer. This is relatively unique in this form. We want to increase the reach of the project through the use of digital media. We have a wide range of formats, from 30-second clips to panel discussions. We accompany events on site, for example at our cooperation partner Utopia, a non-profit co-working space that promotes social and sustainable business start-ups, but we also visit schools, companies and art institutions. We want to make visible and widely disseminate what is happening with us and our project partners. Videos, for example on schools and leadership, will be available on YouTube in future so that all school principals in Germany can benefit from the findings. The same applies, for example, to a use case that shows how material can be saved in production or how to set up a social enterprise. We want to deliver professionally produced image material that can also hold its own internationally. That is also part of Next Level.

Thank you very much for the interview!

Leuphana University of Lüneburg is the only university in Lower Saxony to receive an award in the federal-state program "Innovative University". For the implementation of its project "Transformation through Innovation and Cooperation in Communities" and to strengthen the research-based transfer of ideas, knowledge and technology, Leuphana is receiving millions in funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the state of Lower Saxony. The project will be funded for a period of five years. The GWK selected a total of 55 universities nationwide in an expert-led competition process.