Fostering Knowledge Transfer from Universities to Business – Innovation to Unicorn

The focus of the project is on strengthening partner universities’ knowledge and technology transfer processes and enhance entrepreneurial education. 

Through its participation in the HEI initiative, our UNIcorn consortium intends to achieve the highest-level management involvement and leadership on business collaboration of higher education institutions in the Baltic region, develop and strengthen technology transfer (TT) processes, partnerships and network as well as improve the impact framework of technology transfer and entrepreneurial education. 

Project activities involve a number of knowledge sharing events with entrepreneurship ecosystem stakeholders – companies, investors, private and public venture capital funds, public innovation agencies, industry clusters, start-up communes. For bringing research as quickly as possible into the market it is necessary having strong ties with the entrepreneurship ecosystem stakeholders – strengthening these ties is one of the core objectives of the project.

The project UNIcorn is focused on four components of an university-based entrepreneurship ecosystem (out of seven): 

1. Faculty, staff, student entrepreneurs – we want to raise awareness of top management, academic and non-academic staff as well as students on knowledge and technology transfer, innovation and entrepreneurship (WP6); we want to make shift in research career approaches, where entrepreneurship and innovation has a clear role (WP2);
2. Traditional Technology Transfer Office – we want to launch new and strengthen existing knowledge and technology transfer offices and processes in partner HEIs (WP2);
3. Community engagement: projects, coaching, mentoring, internships, events – we want to create preincubation programmes for researchers and students, engaging start-up community (WP2); we want to disseminate knowledge and results created within the project widely in partner universities, start-up communes of the three Baltic countries and partner networks (WP6); we want to expand our partnerships and networks with entrepreneurship ecosystem stakeholders (WP4);
4. Curriculum: undergraduate, graduate: we want to develop new entrepreneurial teaching modules, learn new teaching methods, offer researchers and students practical entrepreneurial experiences and increase the quality of entrepreneurial education (WP3).

The unique contribution of the UNIcorn project is the common development of project outputs by project partners in the region, of which the most significant are: 

• Technology transfer process and handbook
• Unified TT terminology dictionary
• Commercialisation proceed standardised 
• Universities measures for innovation support
• Training materials, IP and licensing policies
• Preincubation programmes
• Joint pre-acceleration programme pilot
• Advanced educational methodology
• Improved KTT awareness, intensified spin-off activity
• New collaborations and partners engaged to partner HEI activities
• Curriculum innovation, improved/new educational courses
• Training manual, marketing materials
• Improved international network of HEI partners
• Impact measurement manual
• Process for educating future entrepreneurs established