Education for innovation: trends, collaborations and views

Education and training represent an important framework condition to promote future competences and high qualified skills of engineers and high-skilled workers in general. In the last 5 years, innovation is considered the overarching policy driving all other European policies such as higher education with the purpose of building an Innovation Union. In this perspective, today there is the urgency to inter-relate higher education competence development and innovative industries to leverage future jobs creation and maximise the benefits of internationalisation into a consolidated scheme across the European Union. This paper presents an overview in this complex area for a holistic approach to innovation and is a consequential result of a support action project with stakeholders that have promoted a paradigm change based on research and innovation. The overview reports on trends, initiatives of academia-industry collaborations, views of European stakeholders on priority themes in the process of change.