In the last few years, there has been a tendency for higher education institutions and universities (HEIs) to supplement their traditional roles of teaching and research with a third mission referring to their social, enterprise, and innovation activities. Although these institutions have always played a vital role in knowledge creation, technology transfers, and local, regional economic, and cultural development, the growing importance of faculty outreach performance, public engagement, and the contribution to national and regional innovation activities have been driven by recent and future challenges. Besides the general phenomenon that in most parts of the world, the elite system of higher education has transformed into a mass system, higher educational institutions must face the global and local challenges initiated by globalization, the structural convergence of the national systems, the technological revolution induced by the arrival and rapid diffusion of digital technologies, the marketization of higher education, the intensification of the ranking competition among the incumbent players and new entrants, the increasing importance of the closer alignment between the skills and competencies imposed by the labor market and the educational offerings of universities, and the changing philosophies and policies considering accreditation, funding and financing, cooperation and governance. Furthermore, the complex and intertwined social, environmental, and economic challenges related to sustainable development are urging scientific, technological, and social innovations at all levels and from all actors of the global and national economy. As the new pressures of sustainable development and technological progress have emerged, and the new approaches and concepts of innovation systems have appeared and strengthened, higher education institutions’ missions, functions, tasks, and responsibilities have been reinterpreted.
To address these global and local challenges, HEIs form local, regional, and international collaboration and participate in multi-actor networks targeting teaching and learning, research, or social services and spillovers. Collaboration and networking activities of higher education institutions can take several forms depending on the level (e.g., scholars, departments, faculties, universities); discipline (e.g., interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary); the number and types of sectors (e.g., sectoral vs. cross-sectoral) and partners (higher education institutions, research institutions, business actors, government agencies, NGOs, social actors, and civil society); and the geographical scope (local, regional, national, international, transnational) of the collaboration. Collaboration for teaching and learning purposes includes joint degree program and curriculum developments; study abroad exchanges; student, trainee, teacher, and staff mobility; export of education; degree projects; mentoring; and internships – to name a few. Since higher education institutions are committed to providing advanced human resources and knowledge by exploiting their strengths in their interdisciplinary teaching and research and in their network capacity to develop innovative solutions, there is also a tendency towards the repositioning of universities in the innovation literature considering their role of orchestrating multi-actor innovation networks, and their transformation into regional centers of entrepreneurial activity.
The track welcomes a wide range of topics that use integrated approaches of strategic, project, and knowledge management at higher education institutions, including theoretical and empirical papers employing qualitative, quantitative, and critical methods and aims to focus on:

• innovation projects and project innovations (HEI perspective)
• innovation in curriculum development or innovative teaching solutions (HEI perspective)
• innovation in competency development
• innovation networks in higher education

Nikolett Deutsch, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
Viktória Papp-Horváth, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary