Innovation Salons – Events for dialogical knowledge transfer between civil society and higher education institutions

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are recognised as generators for innovative solution relevant for shaping socio-economic transformation processes, for which knowledge transfer plays a crucial role. However, innovation studies demonstrate that innovative solutions, for example, in form of social innovation are generated by a wide variety of creative, social, or cultural actors with little or no integration of HEIs. Several regions and countries, therefore, recently set up innovation strategies that foster new forms of collaboration among societal actors and HEIs. The German Ministry for Education and Research developed the ‘Innovative Hochschule’ programme for initiating and testing new knowledge transfer instruments of HEIs to reach out to and interact with a broader society. Within this scope we developed ‘Innovation Salons’ as an instrument for dialogical knowledge transfer that helps regional HEIs to tie in with and unfold agency in ongoing regional (social) innovation processes. This paper introduces a pilot Innovation Salon as a potential approach for how HEIs may reach out to a-typical innovation actors for shaping social and problem-centred regional innovation processes. Key conclusions underline the importance of scouting for ongoing processes of generating novel regional solutions and of curating the interaction between social society actors and HEIs.