The entrepreneurship team (around ten people) at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek (UNIOS) in Croatia have been using the HEInnovate self-assessment tool for about ten years. Dr. Suncica Oberman Peterka, who is one of the members of HEInnovate’s Experts Group, explained the concept of the HEInnovate self-assessment to the dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business at UNIOS after she was appointed vice-dean for cooperation with environment, international cooperation, and projects in 2018. As a result, they decided to share the HEInnovate self-assessment with the entire Faculty, urging staff to complete it. Thus, the entrepreneurship team could understand the ways in which staff believed the faculty needed to adapt to a changing world. As the faculties at Croatian universities operate independently from one another, staff at the Faculty of Economics and Business completed the self-assessment as a reflection on the progress of the specific Faculty, rather than the University overall.

The faculty is well-known in Croatia as a hub for entrepreneurship learning. Professor Slavica Singer, Professor Emeritus at the Faculty and UNESCO Chair in Entrepreneurship, has been a champion for the advancement of entrepreneurship education at the University. She established and headed the first graduate programme in entrepreneurship in Croatia in 2000 and is an important driver behind entrepreneurship education.

The faculty carries out a broad range of activities to foster staff and students becoming more entrepreneurial and innovative. They encourage their students to be part of making a difference, improving their design thinking and training them to solve real-world problems. Some lecturers have used HEInnovate in their entrepreneurship class coursework to help students understand the different aspects of entrepreneurship. Upon completing the self-assessment, the students were engaged in a reflection about the results which helped explain to them that being entrepreneurial is not only a matter of starting a business. It benefits universities in different ways, as depicted in the various HEInnovate dimensions. The faculty have been also successful in their digital transformation, motivated by the move to online education during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they have a very strong entrepreneurial ecosystem and good communication networks with the business community.

While the Faculty of Economics and Business is spearheading entrepreneurial activities, there are barriers at the level of the institution overall to becoming more innovative and entrepreneurial. The entrepreneurship team at the Faculty of Economics and Business uses HEInnovate to support pushing for necessary changes at the University, but some changes are difficult and slow to move forward without the help of more senior management. The University is a publicly funded institution operating in a non-competitive market and as a result, it lacks the drive to promote an entrepreneurial agenda at the strategic level. This is also translated for many Faculty members as a lack the motivation for pushing for innovative change. Most faculties still offer more traditional teaching methods, and outside of the Faculty of Economics and Business, there are no entrepreneurship courses offered to students. Therefore, the entrepreneurial team found it difficult to encourage other faculty members to complete the HEInnovate self-assessment.

The entrepreneurial staff found the HEInnovate self-assessment to be useful when looking at Faculty members’ results broken down by demographics—particularly age. The results revealed that the younger staff members take a more innovative approach to teaching, using new techniques. In contrast, the older staff overall tend to want to use older teaching techniques. The entrepreneurial team feels that these results are a useful resource for Faculty members to see where they stand in that results breakdown, and how they could improve.

The faculty’s comparatively lower scores for The Internationalised Institution dimension of the HEInnovate self-assessment also aided Dr. Oberman Peterka, who is vice-dean of international cooperation, in explaining to other Faculty why internationalism is important within the faculty. The entrepreneurial team believes that the introduction of international students and professors to the UNIOS campus will be enormously beneficial for Croatian students’ development and worldview and for the University’s international collaboration potential. Therefore, they are pushing for institutional changes, such as the introduction of more English-speaking courses, to meet these goals. The HEInnovate self-assessment provides the team with evidence to share about why those advancements are so important.

Members of the Faculty of Economics and Business also engage in HEInnovate events. Dr. Oberman Peterka, as one of the members of HEInnovate’s Experts Group, leads workshops and trainings on behalf of HEInnovate. Before becoming part of the Experts Group, she, her colleague Prof. Dr. Aleksandar Erceg, and her other colleague Dr. Julia Peric attended the HEInnovate Train the Trainers workshop in Brussels. Dr. Erceg attended the training in the autumn of 2023, Dr. Oberman Peterka attended the training in 2016, and Dr. Peric attended the training in 2018. Dr. Oberman Peterka was inspired by the many examples of international universities using the HEInnovate tools and resources to make their universities become more innovative. Dr. Erceg has the contact information of his fellow participants and plans to reach out to other trainees to exchange experiences and potentially collaborate on future research.

HEInnovate was also the focus of a workshop which was part of the RED Conference (Region Entrepreneurship Development Conference) in Osijek in 2024. The workshop highlighted the benefits of HEInnovate as a tool for working towards a more entrepreneurial university and made use of the HEInnovate action cards to explore the potential for universities’ regional connections. Discussions at the workshop revealed the importance of aligning various entrepreneurial activities across the university to foster a more cohesive entrepreneurial education. These initiatives include the BAS4SC project, which focuses on developing Business Analytics Skills for Future-proof Supply Chains, and the EIT HEI Initiative SFF.DeepT+, which centres on deep-tech entrepreneurship. Another key outcome of the workshop was a dialogue about strengthening the focus on social innovation in coursework, and implementing teaching and learning practices based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, to facilitate positive change in regional communities. Plans for this included holding a hackathon and giving students a setting to collaborate and work towards solutions to societal challenges using innovative methods.

Going forward, Dr. Oberman Peterka would like to arrange a national-level round table on the importance of changing as a university to become more entrepreneurial, inviting private and public universities and entrepreneurship centres in Zagreb. She envisions a discussion which aims to answer why universities becoming more entrepreneurial is so important for whom, what characteristics make up an entrepreneurial university (using HEInnovate in this part of the conference), and how can universities change to become more entrepreneurial.

Prepared by Charlotte Armstrong, Technopolis Group