The major event, taking place across Kaunas, Vilnius, and Alytus, brought together business school leaders, researchers, and corporate partners to make their collaboration more effective. Together, participants explored what corporations expect from researchers, what universities need from businesses, and how to build value-based partnerships. This shared vision enhances the relevance of curricula, the societal impact of research, and the employability of graduates.

Any partnership is based on three steps: finding a common language, reaching a mutual understanding, and agreeing on a shared goal. However, a joint workshop at the conference revealed a reality: business partners do not read scientific articles. This means that while the first condition is seemingly met, there is still a long way to go before achieving the remaining two. This leads to a call to action for all of us – a popular science translation must be published for every scientific article in a language that business partners can easily understand. Only by learning to truly listen to each other can we pave the way toward meaningful collaboration and shared goals.

Another overarching theme of the conference was societal impact, which is constantly expected from all stakeholders, whether in the form of social visibility, impact, or something else. To reach a common understanding in an engineer-like fashion, the following model can be applied:

• Actions: Their positive and negative effects are directed at the "big picture" (e.g., the population of a region/country or society as a whole).
• These impacts result from the sum of many individual outcomes.
• Since impacts focus on the big picture, they are usually highly abstract (e.g., improvement in quality of life, increase in well-being) and difficult to measure precisely. For this reason, impact management in universities is usually limited to outcomes—or, if those cannot be measured, to outputs.

Thus, the concept of impact differs from the concept of an outcome in that an outcome describes "only" the effect of outputs on their specific stakeholder group. Impacts, on the other hand, affect a group of people that extends far beyond that immediate stakeholder group.

Editor: Tairi Tuulik