Introduction

The European universities initiative (EUI) has launched 41 university alliances under the Erasmus + Programme. These universities have committed to intensifying collaboration in a variety of fields, with a focus on building joint online campuses where students can take courses from another university and get credit for them. The characteristics of the alliances vary significantly: some consist of established research universities, some mostly of newcomers, some of technical universities, some of generalists, some with a focus on the arts or business (Gunn, 2020). Yet the underlying idea is similar: to increase collaboration between previously more-or-less unconnected universities.

For instance, the “EuroTeQ Engineering University” consists of six well-established universities of technology, namely Czech Technical University (CTU), École Polytechnique (L’X), Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Technical University of Munich (TUM), Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The stated goal of this alliance is to open courses to students of the other alliance members, collaborate in research and entrepreneurship activities and set standards for educating engineers of the future (EuroTeQ, 2022), including lifelong learning. Besides EuroTeQ, there are other technology-focused alliances, including the “European Engineering Learning Innovation and Science Alliance” (EELISA) or the “European Universities of Technology Alliance” (ENHANCE).

Higher education collaborations — such as strategic alliances, joint ventures, university collaborations, partnerships or mergers -— provide an opportunity to solve challenging issues by conferring resources, knowledge, and skills, leveraging structure and support (Eddy, 2010; Pinheiro et al., 2016; Valmeekanathan et al., 2021) of involved partners to achieve common objectives. These collaborations in higher education take place in many forms, such as between or among institutions as a whole, as departmental collaborations across institutions, or as university programs that join forces with businesses, communities or NGOs (Eddy, 2010). Collaborations that go beyond mere window dressing and that enhance academic performance, achieve economic efficiencies and better align the network and performance of institutions to public needs seem to be able to strategically stimulate institutional initiative, support effective planning and implementation, secure stakeholder buy-in, concentrate resources, and achieve policy alignment (Thune, 2011; Williams, 2017). Long-term financing gives higher education organizations flexibility to set their own agenda and focus on their strategic aims (Larsen, 2020).

However, the creation of European alliances, with roughly five to eight members, aimed at setting educational standards and intensifying collaboration in various fields, is a relatively novel phenomenon and has few precedents. Recent literature has started to examine the main themes addressed by these alliances (Fumasoli & Rossi, 2021; Brooks & Rensimer, 2023), their alignment with the economic competitiveness of Europe (Flury et al., 2021), and their alignment with good practices according to the Civic Universities’ standards (Arnaldo Valdes & Gomez Comendador, 2022). In addition, there are important questions about the motives and incentives of universities for joining such alliances. Besides the EU policy objectives of these alliances (and the lip service all must give to join), it is likely that a strong pull for many universities to join has been the fear of being left out and the uncertainty of how this new programme will interact with existing EU higher education programmes.

In this article, we acknowledge the likely role of such incentives but focus on the question what role EUI alliances can play in making universities address the new demands they are expected to address. While there is currently insufficient theoretical and empirical research on the rationale and success of such collaboration (Vukasovic & Stensaker, 2018), there is especially a shortage of empirical knowledge of how university alliances work and how alliance formation interacts with the impact of universities on society. The question of the role and societal responsibility of universities has come to the fore in recent years (Collini, 2012; Geschwind et al., 2019). The launch of the EUI represents the latest step in the evolution of universities in Europe and therefore requires careful consideration of what their societal responsibilities are and how they are meant to fulfil them. Why should half a dozen of universities pool their resources (such as their courses), learn from each other and in this way engage in joint action?

We will survey the emerging political and societal demands on universities and analyse the potential that university alliances have for meeting these demands. We argue that alliances of this kind are promising for bringing about joint action because they enable learning and reflection between universities. In other words, university alliances are learning networks (Gunn & Mintrom, 2013; Fuchs et al., 2022). Universities can share know-how, can work together on a common strategy, pool resources and engage in a mutual dialogue about the role of their universities in society and their societal responsibility, thus participating in a kind of moral reflexivity. We believe the framework of learning networks and inter-university collaboration aids our understanding of the role that alliance formation can play in helping universities re-orient in the face of new demands, especially concerning societal orientation.

We discuss a case study from an inter-university course collaboration as part of the EuroTeQ alliance. Through ethnographic observation, we followed the implementation of a co-creative learning format across the six member universities (“EuroTeQ Collider”). We describe how learning took place during the planning and implementation phase and discuss the propensity and limits of this collaborative exercise in creating joint action between universities. We acknowledge that establishing general statements about EUI alliances will require further empirical case studies beyond our interpretive qualitative case study.

We focus on the creation of alliances between technical universities (Geschwind & Broström, 2022) and our case study arises from one of them. The role of technical universities in society has come into sharp focus in recent years (see articles in Taebi et al., 2019). Besides the traditional functions of research and education, universities of technology are expected to generate new technologies that can be translated into solutions that encompass technical as well as social aspects.

The next section surveys the emerging demands on the role of universities in society that motivate the creation of EUI alliances. In Sect. 3 we describe such alliances in terms of learning networks in order to address these new demands. In Sect. 4 we illustrate the idea of a learning network by means of the EuroTeQ Collider case study. Section 5 concludes.

The changing role of universities in society

Today, universities engage in a wide range of activities. Already in 1963, Clark Kerr introduced the term multiversity to recognise the great variety of activities and societal functions universities are expected to fulfil in addition to research and education (Kerr, 1963). As part of the so-called “third mission” (Papadimitriou, 2020; Compagnucci & Spigagelli, 2020), universities contribute to regional development (Pinheiro et al., 2012), engage in lifelong learning activities, host public lectures, advise local government or other stakeholders and catalyse academic entrepreneurship (Siegel & Wright, 2015) and a wide range of other co-creation activities (Ramaswamy, 2011; Berghaeuser & Hoelscher, 2020; Lipp et al., 2022; Trencher et al., 2014).

This expansion of university activities is accompanied by changing views about the role of the university in society. Instrumentalist views about the role of universities (Fuchs et al., 2023) see the value of universities mainly in their contribution to societal or economic goals. After World War II, universities were tasked to focus on basic research and technology in the hope that these will later serve public purposes like national defense or welfare (Bush, 1945). The concept of the “entrepreneurial university” highlighted that universities also play a role in disseminating research in the form of patents and innovations, thus directly contributing to economic development (Etzkowitz, 2003). Today, there is recognition that universities need to address societal goals more directly and assume broader societal responsibilities (Arnaldo Valdes & Gomez Comendador, 2022; Trencher et al., 2014; Martin, 2012). Geschwind and colleagues (2019, 4) observe that universities “are expected to contribute to the development and resilience of societies“, “to provide students with high-quality, relevant education” and to have “an impact on the cultural, social, political, technological and economic development”.

Against this broader shift in the role of universities in society, we identify three societal demands on universities that provide the most direct rationale for the creation of university alliances, namely the need for European integration, addressing grand challenges and reforming the European innovation ecosystems as key reasons for joint action between universities.

First, EU tertiary education projects such as the EU-sponsored Erasmus programme have been guided by the idea of creating European integration by encouraging student exchange between member states (Flury et al., 2021; Brooks, 2021; Corbett, 2005). As demonstrated in the Erasmus student exchange programme, tertiary education is the primary level on which such integration takes place. The facilitation of mobility for higher education students has already been successful in bringing about a new generation of citizens with a European outlook. However, the continued challenge of European integration and collaboration between EU member states means that this goal remains the basic rationale for alliance formation.

Second, the narrative of grand societal challenges (such as climate change) has been central to EU research funding policy. Instead of science for science’s sake, there is now strong recognition that science must be employed to tackle societal problems (Nowotny et al., 2001; Gibbons et al., 1994). The narrative of grand challenges for society and engineers serves as the focus point for the recent changes in thinking about responsibility at engineering universities (Rip, 2018). In the case of universities of technology, the narrative of grand challenges has also contributed to the need to rethink education more broadly (Välikangas, 2022; Trencher et al., 2014), thus requiring joint agency with other universities facing the need to reform their curriculum. The need to reform engineering given the orientation towards grand challenges is often discussed as the need to define the “engineer of the future”. Such a notion challenges three aspects of traditional engineering education. It forces universities to identify a broader set of skills, beyond merely technical expertise. Engineers must be able to relate their technical expertise, implement it in a social reality, communicate and be able to reflect. Furthermore, it places increased emphasis on lifelong learning activities. Universities offer courses for alumni and other graduates and offer certificates that do not result in degrees. Finally, the core implication of the grand challenges narrative is to require more interdisciplinary work (Cuevas-Garcia, 2021). This can also be observed in engineering education. Meijers and den Brok (2013, 28) wrote that “[m]uch innovation takes place at the interface between disciplines and students must learn to seek and embrace the creative tension arising from multidisciplinary contacts”.

Third, the realisation that the EU lags behind the US in terms of commercialisation of (university) research led to an increased focus on academic entrepreneurship and valorisation of research findings (Salajan, 2018). The need for greater collaboration between universities must also be understood in reference to this need for changes in the entrepreneurship culture in Europe. New products and services, and along with them new economic players, of the telecommunications revolutions came from the United States (Google, Facebook, Amazon) and increasingly from China (Alibaba, Tencent). Part of the response to this perceived need was the establishment of the “European Institute of Innovation and Technology” (EIT) in 2008 to ensure that the next big innovations also originate from Europe (“the next Google should come from Europe”). Another step was the promotion of the idea of an “entrepreneurial university” (Pinheiro & Stensaker, 2014). Joining up powers between universities in the form of alliance formation may be yet another way to address this gap.

To understand the role of university alliances, we must recognise that overarching cultural, societal and economic concerns require that we take a different perspective on what universities are meant to achieve (integration, addressing grand challenges, innovation ecosystem). For society and policymakers, science and education are not merely carried out for their own sake but should also address the broader concerns of the societies in which they are conducted (Trencher et al., 2014). Additionally, universities have the autonomy to determine their own educational curriculum (within national frameworks and within professional codes) and to define research and entrepreneurship priorities. This becomes clearer if compared to the scope of secondary schools to determine their educational curricula. Given that these curricula are set to a large extent by ministries of education and exam boards, there would be little sense for secondary schools to engage in a similar type of alliance formation as universities. For universities, however, this makes sense simply because of their greater autonomy. The next section will now turn to how university alliances may aid in addressing these needs.

University alliances as learning networks

What are the grounds for thinking that university alliances will help universities address these new demands on universities? The need to supply an answer to this question becomes pertinent when we consider that there are also powerful theoretical arguments supporting the decentralisation of research, teaching and entrepreneurship activities.

The first argument draws on a tradition in the philosophy of science that is skeptical of interferences in the organisation and coordination of science. Researchers’ (or at least individual universities’) knowledge, the argument maintains, places them in the best position to make decisions about research priorities and methods. The most famous picture of this view is given by Michael Polanyi (Polanyi, 1951), who compares the organisation of science to solving a puzzle. Central supervision seems inferior to letting researchers follow their inclinations and hunches. Similarly, it might be argued that forming alliances is an attempt to supervise a creative process that is best left unsupervised. Instead, one may argue, we should welcome the diversity and research competition between different university traditions for experimenting with different approaches to advance science and technology for devising solutions to grand societal challenges.

Besides this epistemic argument about the decentralisation of research, there is a second well-known economic argument for competition in tertiary education, namely to allow students to make choices among a wide variety of higher education options. Thanks to the creation of a European Higher Education Area since the 1990s, students increasingly choose on the basis of university rankings, university characteristics and monetary prospects (tuition fees, expected salaries); as opposed to mere geographical vicinity. University alliances create common educational campuses and thus (to a certain extent) homogenise their approaches. Should we not instead welcome the existing diversity and wealth of options for education that has emerged for students in recent decades?

For entrepreneurship, too, there may be reasons to be skeptical that increased collaboration between universities will aid in the reform of the European innovation ecosystem. Competition between universities as centres of entrepreneurship may be encouraged for market-based reasons similar to those of students. A greater variety of approaches may allow for greater experimentation and better address the different needs across campuses, regions and nation states. Besides, the desire to file and guard patents with new university-generated technology may fuel secrecy between universities and may make collaborations difficult. Industry collaborations may be jealously guarded from other research teams and universities.

A final argument concerns less the basic rationale, but the concrete design of the EUI alliances. The EUI encourages alliances between universities located in different countries, ideally with a good spread, including universities from “old” and “new” EU member states. On the face of it, it is not obvious how aligning universities with different histories, languages and national higher education and research frameworks could be the best way to generate joint action between universities. Would not aligning universities within a country be a more straightforward way of increasing collaboration?

One reply to these worries concerns the structural set-up of the EUI. Gunn (2020) has shown in his narrative of the history of efforts towards creating a more integrated European higher education sector, there have been various attempts towards harmonisation. In the past, the main idea was to establish new European flagship institutions (such as the “European University Institute” in Florence, established in 1972) that would serve as a role model for other institutions in Europe. By contrast, the present effort towards alliance formation encourages the dispersed joining up of (bottom-up) efforts, with a resulting multitude of approaches. In other words, thanks to the multitude of networks, there is little danger that the diversity and experimentation among universities within Europe is diminished.

Thinking of universities as members of alliances, we may ask in which sense universities in such European alliances are complementary in a way that promises to mobilise their collaboration without undermining their diversity. In other words, what do some universities have that others lack and whose pooling may aid in addressing a societal need? Kitagawa (2010), for example, describes how Scottish universities pool together research resources to make their areas of excellence more visible. Besides, in the little scholarly attention that university alliances have, they have been analysed in terms of learning networks (Gunn & Mintrom, 2013).

Organisational learning is commonly defined as a change in the organization’s knowledge that occurs as a function of experience (Argote, 2013; Fiol & Lyles, 1985). In higher education, the theory of organizational learning as the process of generating, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge has been applied to organizational processes such as achieving and sustaining change (Boyce, 2003) or to characteristics of the organization such as inequality in educational outcomes for historically disadvantaged groups (Bensimon, 2005). In the context of university alliances, we identify three levels on which learning networks may generate organisational learning, which we call know-how, strategy and moral reflexivity. In the following paragraphs, we draw heavily on our recent work on learning networks (Fuchs et al., 2022).

Know-how. Universities can acquire basic know-how on how to improve their activities, for instance education. This type of learning consists in the form of knowledge and practice. By sharing best practices and practical know-how academics can improve their own activities. For example, universities can learn from early adopters with experience with new educational formats. Universities and academics can share know-how by exchanging course syllabi, reading lists, project ideas and best practices for collaborating with external stakeholders. More generally, they may share experiences on orientating education towards societal considerations. In the next section we discuss the example of the EuroTeQ Collider programme which illustrates the sharing of basic know-how with the example of challenge-based learning programmes.

Strategy. Besides know-how, university managers and boards can discuss ideas and collaborate to pursue a common university strategy. This type of learning consists of relating to each other, understanding the strategic decisions that other universities make and potentially working towards collectivizing for joint action in these strategies. This type of learning may affect the university much more holistically. It is not just individual academics who share know-how, but university management may share ideas about how best to collaborate with other societal actors, such as political actors, NGOs or industry. For instance, the universities may exchange experiences in setting up, maintaining and cultivating a university “ecosystem”, with other societal actors who are (spatially) close to universities and who closely interact with them for the delivery of their services to society. The formation of a university alliance may help formulate and implement strategies for linking ecosystems with each other. The resulting sharing of resources and knowledge may give a decisive advantage to these individual ecosystems (Gunn & Mintrom, 2013).

Moral Reflexivity. As we already argued before, universities are required to accommodate to a great number of demands for change. This means that universities must also actively reflect on what their societal role is and how their past practices may not have fulfilled this normative role. Deliberating such a sensitive topic and accordingly modifying education, research and innovation practices requires a platform where universities can mutually reflect on their practices. University alliances may also be a good way to “hold themselves accountable” to implement considerations of responsibility. By adopting a similar framework, comparing and benchmarking their activities, universities can make themselves accountable to the other members of the alliance. Such a platform to reflect on one’s own activities and values necessarily requires a culture of open conversation and transparency to function well. Such a platform must go beyond merely showcasing success stories at universities. They must also allow in-depth discussions of failures and obstacles encountered in implementing considerations of responsibility.

Engaging in a discourse of “responsibility” is far from self-evident for organizations in general and universities in particular. Sharing know-how and strategy may be risky in a competitive European higher education market (Aghion et al., 2010; Sánchez-Chaparro et al., 2021). University alliance partners will always consider the return on investment and be careful when sharing core organizational aspects such as knowledge and strategy. This is even stronger for moral reflexivity. Moral reflexivity is already delicate for communication at the single university level (Entradas, 2022; Simancas Gonzalez & Garcia Lopez, 2019), as it forces universities to be open about values and strategy and flexible enough not to counteract their other goals. In the case of social and healthcare service networks, Visse and colleagues (2012) show that instrumentalist ways of thinking about responsibilities may be counterproductive. They argue that members of the organisation constantly must find out who they are in relation to others, what their core shared values are and what the resulting responsibilities are. Toiviainen and Kira (2017) mention three types of struggles to realise moral reflexivity: differences in practices, challenges that follow from multivoicedness, and the experienced gap between the networking ideals and the reality of cooperation. At the same time, they refer to positive aspects of collaborations or alliances, going back to the first two core organizational aspects of knowledge and strategy. The alliance members can use “emotional resources (e.g., a stronger sense of meaningfulness at work), cognitive resources (e.g., understanding the customer needs from alternative perspectives), and social resources (e.g., being able to rely on other professionals’ competence)” (ibid., 479).

The basic idea of learning networks is that universities share insights with each other and create the conditions for collaboration without giving up on the diversity of approaches. Broadly speaking, know-how concerns straightforward practical knowledge that universities may share with each other. Strategy pertains to the mental frameworks that university boards and academics use when making decisions. Moral reflexivity is about changing the values and views on responsibility held by participants. Universities help themselves and others to accommodate the new challenges we identified above regarding education, research and entrepreneurship. By focusing on the idea of learning networks, we can see more clearly how the diversity of universities within alliances may be conducive to addressing European integration, grand societal challenges and reforms in the European innovation ecosystem.

This section argued that university alliances are best understood as learning networks to make sense of how they can address new societal demands on universities while preserving their decentralized efforts and diversity. The next section will turn to illustrate this concept by means of the EuroTeQ Collider.

Case study: the EuroTeQ collider

The effort of the EuroTeQ Engineering University to set up a co-creative learning format across the alliance provides an interesting example to illustrate the notion of a learning network and how university alliances may aid universities in adjusting to new demands. One of the main goals of the EuroTeQ Engineering University was to implement a semi-standardized format of challenge-based learning to bring together students across degree programs and universities, companies, the NGOs sector and academic staff to address grand societal challenges.Footnote 1 While challenge-based learning can take many different shapes, the EuroTeQ alliance envisioned a “Green Challenge” in all partner universities; a competition originally developed at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). This initiative was called “EuroTeQ Collider”.

The initiative consisted of the following steps: first, a committee formed by strategic partners and staff from all the universities decides on a general theme. A “call for ideas” resulted in three topic domains: cities, energy and consumption. Second, a call for specific challenges on the selected general topic is launched, in which external public and private organizations, academic units and student teams can submit challenges for students to develop possible solutions. Third, multidisciplinary groups of students are recruited across the challenges to work on their solution for a certain period of time (from one to eight weeks). Fourth, a challenge-based learning activity is implemented in each university, where student teams are selected for the next step. Fifth, the winning teams of each university are brought together to refine their pitch presentations and participate in a final competition (the “EuroTeQathon”). Sixth, the winners of this final competition travel to Brussels to present their ideas to the European Commission.

In the first edition of the EuroTeQ Collider in the spring semester of 2022, staff from L’X were in charge of inter-university coordination. The selected theme was “Leave no waste behind” and focused on the categories of “cities”, “energy”, and “consumption”. Although the initial plan was that all universities would share the same duration, due to calendar disparities and the assumed workload of staff and students the competitions were assigned different timeframes in each partner university. Three universities gave 8 weeks to the teams to work on their solution, one university gave 3 weeks, and two universities gave only one week. The local pitching events were all held in May, and the EuroTeQathon took place 10–12 June.

Our observations of this project draw on a wider study of the trajectory of the EuroTeQ alliance conducted in the Horizon 2020-funded project BoostEuroTeQ: strengthening institutional transformations for responsible engineering education in Europe. The project brings together researchers from the social sciences and humanities from the six EuroTeQ universities to explore how these universities redefine the profile of the engineering university and the European engineer of the future. The research accompanies the alliance formation process and provides recommendations on how to better integrate responsible research and innovation across the network.

In the case of the EuroTeQ Collider, we conducted ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews with organisers and participants in the six EuroTeQ universities, the final cross-university event (the EuroTeQathon) and mentoring sessions. In each university, we interviewed at least one course organiser, one teaching staff, and two students. Furthermore, we established several informal conversations with participating students, jury members, and challenge givers. The research design consists of a comparative case study approach informed by multi-sited ethnography and constructionist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Marcus, 1995).

Our interviews and observations showed that launching this format in the different partner universities posed great challenges to some. One of the EuroTeQ partner universities struggled to get students to sign up for the course because the format was new and unfamiliar in that institutional context. Those students who had signed up dropped out because they did not receive credits for their overall degree programmes at that university. One of the other universities — one of the more experienced in implementing challenge-based learning — also struggled to run a local competition and, instead, only one team from another course was sent to participate in the EuroTeQathon. By contrast, in other universities, especially those with significant experience organizing such learning formats, the implementation was smooth and registration numbers were higher. In two universities, students could choose between 15 challenges, and the resulting teams consisted of four to six members.

Another striking result of our comparative work is the difference in experience in working with external stakeholders in co-creative teaching. Some universities had relatively little experience including external stakeholders and challenges, with students being relatively unacquainted with teamwork and challenge-based learning approaches. A primary motivation for implementing a teaching format across universities was that the strengths of some of the universities in this field may be translated into learning opportunities for others as part of the EuroTeQ project. The Collider therefore represents an interesting case to illustrate different ways how collaboration may help overcome some of these problems and results in the creation of learning networks, including the exchange of know-how, the formulation of strategy and engagement in moral reflexivity.

Considering know-how, the most important factor was that the Collider enabled the sharing of knowledge on challenge-based learning across partner universities. The six organisers of local Collider courses held regular (roughly every six weeks) online meetings throughout the planning and implementation phase. In these meetings, they discussed the thematic orientation of the project, the learning format, the local obstacles towards implementation, as well as the organisation of local events and the EuroTeQaThon. In the interviews with these local organisers, they reported that these coordination meetings were highly constructive and useful for sharing experiences with this learning format. Especially those organisers working at universities with little experience in co-creative teaching and stakeholder collaboration reported that these meetings gave them crucial insights into how to set up and implement such a course. Those universities with more experience, too, could reflect and improve their existing practices. The rapid transmission of co-creative educational formats and discussions about societal responsibility from some universities to others is the most important opportunity resulting from the EuroTeQ Collider.

In terms of strategy, we observed that the universities benefited from discussing how to approach stakeholders in their local ecosystems and what to expect from those interactions. Technical universities are often entangled with an “ecosystem” of companies and other societal stakeholders (Jongbloed et al., 2008; Geschwind & Broström, 2022; Youtie & Shapira, 2008). This raises the question how such universities can collaborate with their respective ecosystem and what type of leadership may be expected from them. The opportunity in terms of defining a strategy is to collaborate with societal stakeholders and student initiatives and in this way increase the ecosystem interaction of universities. Universities co-develop strategies between themselves and actors in their local ecosystems to reinvent their roles and their responsibilities towards students and towards the local economy and community. Since many uncertainties exist, it is beneficial to discuss steps together with local ecosystem partners. Some EuroTeQ universities have established multiple formats to interact and collaborate with local industrial designers and manufacturers. For example, TUM has close contacts with Siemens, Infineon and SAP; TU/e has strong ties with Philips. These universities can decide how to exploit these contacts better for mutual university-industry benefit, but they can also learn together how not to be limited by those relationships but learn to engage with other stakeholders. A primary motivation for implementing the Collider was to strengthen bonds with local organizations while at the same time establishing new ones. For instance, the winners of the EuroTeQathon were teams who closely aligned with local companies: TUM-Siemens, TU/e-Philips, TalTech-R8 Technologies. Some universities seem to be focused on collaborations with industry, with few connections to other parts of society. Knowledge on how to include other challenge holders in the education may be shared by those universities with collaborations with municipalities and civil society.

In terms of defining a strategy for stakeholder engagement, the most substantial exchange during the Collider project took place when the student teams of one university visited another. This happened in two different ways. First, at the end of the course period, there were local events three universities of the alliance visited another one (for example, the students, teachers and organisers of L’X visited TU/e). Challenge stakeholders were present in all three of these resulting events. Several students reported that meeting with the student teams from another university, along with challenge holders, teaching staff and organisers made them fully appreciate the collaborative nature of the educational format.

The event with the most visibility on campus was the final “EuroTeQaThon” in which the best student teams from each university competed with each other in front of a jury. One question that has come up and that has been discussed among those involved in the Collider is to which extent are students autonomous in defining their problem and how closely they must stick to the instructions by the challenge owner, even if the students disagree with the challenge-owner’s framing. Another question concerning the question to which extent the work of student teams is mutually beneficial is the question whether students own the intellectual property derived from their projects. This raised questions about the relationship between the university and its ecosystem.

The diversity of approaches between universities as exemplified by contrasting visions in the local visits and the EuroTeQaThon point to an important danger for the formation of university alliances. Sometimes formats, such as co-creative teaching, are transferred from one university to another without attention to their unique institutional context. Existing formats may be only successful due to the existence of a tradition, experience and a network and it may be impossible to simply ‘transplant’ a successful format to another university. In addition, while some universities may have organizational units dedicated to establishing contacts with stakeholders from their local ecosystems to secure real external challenges, others lack such a unit, with the workload falling onto teaching assistants. Universities have different resources to create interdisciplinary student teams if they only offer engineering programmes. Consequently, some teams develop only a shallow understanding of the social and political aspects of their solutions.

But the question who the universities should aim to interact more closely with (e.g. what type of organizations, companies, NGOs, etc.) raises questions about their moral reflexivity. How can universities find the right balance between establishing contacts with prestigious and technically-fluent organizations on the one hand, and more modest, younger, and vulnerable organizations on the other hand? It is likely that privileged companies know how to respond best to the invitation of the university, they will be better prepared to submit challenges that will be more appealing to students. By contrast, small organizations or those working on less visible, yet necessary services will struggle more to convince students to work on their challenge. Together, the EuroTeQ universities can discuss these inequalities and how to address them.

Our observations are that exchange in terms of moral reflexivity took place mostly during the writing period of the EuroTeQ proposal (of which the Collider was a major part), as well as the planning conversations where the theme “Leave no waste behind” was selected. Selecting such a theme shows that the universities could agree on a common language to understand societal challenges and to orient university education towards addressing them. One danger for technical universities is the idea that addressing grand societal challenges depends merely on novel high-tech solutions, rather than, for example, major social participation, fairer distribution of wealth, concern for the most vulnerable, low-tech solutions, as well as repair and reuse of existing technologies.

Conclusion

The success or failure of the EUI will likely vary between the respective alliances and will depend on the individual context. It is too early to speculate about the likely outcomes of this initiative three years after its launch. The limited empirical basis is insufficient for speculation about a process that will take at least half a decade, with consequences that may only be measurable and understandable later on. Nevertheless, we approached the topic with some optimism and analysed the role that this initiative may play.

We aimed to make three contributions: First, we analysed the changing societal demands on universities (of technology) and traced the distinctly European rationales for placing high importance on joint action among universities, namely the need for further cultural integration in the European Union, the targeting of grand societal challenges, as well as the need to foster entrepreneurship. Second, alliances are likely to contribute to a process of joining up agency between universities because they allow them to share knowledge and align on strategy and values (learning networks). Heterogenous universities with different historical, social and political contexts may learn more from each other than universities from the same country. Third, we illustrated some of these ideas about learning networks by means of our case study from the EuroTeQ university alliance.

There are several limitations to our argument. Most importantly, the conceptualization of university alliances as learning networks and our description of the EuroTeQ Collider as leading to joint strategizing and moral reflection is in some sense idealistic. Given that participating in the EUI is accompanied by substantial financial resources (as well as career opportunities for individuals), there will likely be agents who adopt the language associated with this programme and participate in it mostly due to that motive. A different framework to understand university alliances (one that we cannot explore here) would trace whether the incentives created by programmes like the EUI are productive in the sense that they incentivize behaviour intended by policy programmes.

Universities are unique organisations within society; their role is to be at the frontier of new thinking and societal development. Supporting partnerships among them, moving closer to joint action, will hopefully strengthen their confidence in addressing societal needs and take leadership in moving their ecosystems and other societal actors with them.