The practical lessons from coordinating a HEInnovate self-assessment across the ECIU Alliance
by Charlotte Norrman
Abstract
The ECIU (European University Alliance)¹ used the HEInnovate self-assessment to establish a shared understanding of innovation and entrepreneurship across its member universities. Coordinated by Charlotte Norrman from Linköping University, the process provided a common evidence base that informed a successful application to the EIT Higher Education Initiative. The experience demonstrated how HEInnovate can support collaboration across institutions, strengthen strategic planning, and translate collective reflection into concrete action.
Could you tell us about yourself and your role in the ECIU Alliance?
My name is Charlotte Norrman. I am a PhD and Senior Associate Professor at Linköping University in Sweden, in the Department of Management and Engineering. I have taught entrepreneurship and innovation for around twenty years. These days I teach less. Instead, I work part-time as an innovation coach at LiU Innovation, our university's innovation office, where I support researchers and staff in turning their ideas and research into real-world impact. I sometimes describe it as moving from entrepreneurship teacher to business coach. At Linköping, I also work within our part of ECIU (the European Consortium of Innovative Universities) as a challenge-based learning (CBL) expert — developing our CBL practice and helping teachers who want to bring it into their courses.
What led you to HEInnovate, and what kind of activity did you take part in?
I am part of the HEInnovate expert group, so HEInnovate was already familiar to me. Within ECIU we were preparing an application to the EIT Higher Education Initiative — the programme run by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) to help universities build their capacity to innovate. One of its requirements is that institutional development plans are grounded in a HEInnovate self-assessment: Each university reviews how it performs across the dimensions of an entrepreneurial, innovative institution, and the results inform what the programme calls an Innovation Vision Action Plan (IVAP). In this sense, the self-assessment was not an additional exercise but the evidence base for the application. Rather than having one or two people complete the self-assessment on behalf of the Alliance, we wanted each member university to take part, so that the results reflected lived experience across different institutional contexts. Our project (2026-2028), E-Campus,² set out to build on ECIU’s challenge-based learning — where students work on real-world challenges set by companies and communities — and strengthen its contribution to entrepreneurial skills development and, in some cases, new venture creation.
What specific role did you have in the HEInnovate self-assessment, and how did you organise it across the Alliance?
My role was to coordinate the self-assessment across the partner universities ensuring that each university followed a consistent process and the results could be brought together into an Alliance-level overview. Because the results could be perceived as sensitive, I did not collect anyone's raw answers. Instead, each partner university carried out its own self-assessment and shared only its aggregated results.
To support comparability, all partners were asked to follow the same approach. We provided a short, practical manual with screenshots showing each step of the process, as well as a ready-made invitation email that colleagues could adapt for use within their own institution. I also encouraged each university to invite sufficiently broad group of respondents — at least ten, ideally around twenty — including leadership, teaching staff, professional support staff and students. This mix was important, because different groups often perceive the same institution differently, and the gap between those views itself is revealing.
What did the self-assessment reveal about your Alliance?
The pattern emerged clearly. The Alliance’s strongest areas were external engagements — particularly the partnerships, networks and innovation ecosystems around the universities — and its international reach, which is natural strength of a European Universities Alliance. Another strong area was the ability to prepare students and staff interested in developing entrepreneurial initiatives. The weaker areas were harder to face but particularly valuable to identify. The largest gap was related to impact measurement: while many entrepreneurial activities were already in place, the Alliance was less systematic in tracking how they affect students, ventures and careers over time. The results also showed unevenness in people and resources, particularly in how staff contributions to entrepreneurship and innovation are recognised and rewarded, as well as in digital capability, where some universities were considerably further advanced than others. Seeing the strengths and the gaps together gave the partners a shared evidence base for the conversation about where to focus discussing priorities and deciding where collective action should be focused.
How did you make sense of all the data?
I kept it simple. From the HEInnovate website, each university could download its results in two formats: a spreadsheet of scores, and a short-written report generated automatically by the tool. The scores are given on a scale from one to five for each dimension. I copied every university's scores into a single spreadsheet and used a traffic-light system: green where the score was above average (3), and red where it was below average. This simple visual overview made it easy to see immediately where the Alliance was already doing well and where there was still room to improve, across all the universities together. In practice, this coloured overview turned out to be the most useful outputs of the process.
I also tested a new approach by uploading all the partner reports, together with the funding call, into an AI tool asking it to summarise which areas were performing well, and which had the most room for improvement in relation to the call. It provided a useful starting point, but I still had to review the material carefully and shape the analysis myself. The application format was very short, so the final synthesis had to be concise and selective.
What actions did the results lead to?
The identified gaps shaped the core of the application. Because measuring impact was our main weakness, we designed an approach to track the progress of student teams and ventures over time, helping us better understand the effects of these activities. To address the people-and-incentives gap, we planned a more systematic recognition for staff involved in innovation education, including an award and a “train-the-trainer” scheme to build a wider network of colleagues able to support continuity and implementation. Because digital capability varied across the Alliance, we also planned shared digital tools to help all partners work towards a common standard, regardless of their starting point. At the same time, we built on Alliance’s strengths — its networks, partnerships and international reach — as the foundation for the project. The application was submitted successfully, and the Alliance is now moving into implementation.
What are your main lessons and recommendations for others doing this?
My biggest lesson is that the main challenge is not the HEInnovate self-assessment tool itself but engaging people to take part. The self-assessment is relatively quick: it asks for responders’ honest perceptions, rather than detailed data or figures, so most people can finish it in about ten minutes. However, participation still needs to be actively encouraged, and follow-up is essential. I sent several reminders and in the end most responders completed the self-assessment. A few encountered technical difficulties because they had not joined their institutional group correctly, which meant their answers did not appear in the results The HEInnovate team helped us resolve this, and the website has since been made clearer on this point This was a useful reminder to ask for support early, rather than trying to solve such issues alone.
My advice is therefore simple: provide very clear, step-by-step instructions; invite a broad mix of participants and be prepared for coordination and follow-up to require more effort than the self-assessment itself. More than anything, HEInnovate gave us a shared and honest language for discussing where we stood as an Alliance. That shared evidence base is what a strong application - and a meaningful strategy - needs to build on.
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Full partners: University of Trento (Coordinator, Italy), Hamburg University of Technology (Germany), Linköping University (Sweden), University of Twente (Netherlands), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania), Lodz University of Technology (Poland), University of Aveiro (Portugal)
Associate partners: Dublin City University (Ireland), Institut National des Sciences Appliquées – INSA (France), Tampere University (Finland), University of Stavanger (Norway), Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico); additionally – industry partners
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