A new initiative of the INGENIUM Alliance, the Eco-GENIUM project — Eco-driven Digital & Manufacturing Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the INGENIUM Alliance — has received funding under the “Building Synergies” topic of the EIT Higher Education Initiative (EIT HEI) 2025 call.
Gheorghe Asachi Technical University of Iași (TUIASI) is one of the six higher education institutions in the consortium implementing this project, coordinated by the University of Skövde (Sweden) and including: the University of Oviedo (Spain), Munster Technological University (Ireland), Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences (Germany), Gabriele D’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara (Italy), and two non-university partners: Pheno Horizon (representing the business sector) and the Teaching Factory Competence Centre (a specialised non-HEI entity).
What is Eco-GENIUM
Eco-GENIUM is an initiative within the INGENIUM Alliance that connects innovation-pioneer universities, having consolidated experience in technology transfer, industry collaboration, applied research and entrepreneurship support systems, with higher education institutions currently developing their own innovation ecosystems, in order to create a balanced and complementary collaboration model.
The aim of this project, which runs over a period of 24 months, is to generate a spill-over effect across the entire INGENIUM Alliance, following a clear pathway towards systemic institutional transformation through: transferable governance models, cooperation mechanisms and innovation pipelines that can subsequently be adopted by all its members.
TUIASI involvement and benefits
Based on its previous experience in developing regional innovation ecosystems, Gheorghe Asachi Technical University of Iași leads one of the project’s work packages. TUIASI will design an ecosystem-mapping framework and coordinate a challenge-identification process through which regional stakeholders can articulate innovation needs and transformation priorities.
Gheorghe Asachi Technical University of Iași’s participation in the Eco-GENIUM consortium represents a great opportunity to strengthen institutional innovation capacity and to build strong bridges between academia and industry. Through collaboration with universities with extensive experience in technology transfer, such as those in Skövde, Oviedo and Munster, we have the chance to adopt already-tested governance models and adapt them to the specific context of the innovation ecosystem in North-East Romania.
Assoc. Prof. Nicolae Lucanu, PhD, Project Coordinator, TUIASI
At the same time, TUIASI’s status as a core member of the EIT community (manufacturing) gives us access to European-level resources and training programmes, from which our students will directly benefit. Through this project, we aim to strengthen entrepreneurship and innovation as integral parts of the university’s institutional culture, and to ensure that the results achieved remain visible long after the funding period ends.
Objectives and expected impact
At the consortium level, Eco-GENIUM aims to:
- Promote innovation governance across the partner higher education institutions;
- Establish an interface with the European innovation and technology ecosystem, by creating a long-term institutional integration pathway with the relevant communities (manufacturing; raw materials and circular economy; digital transformation), positioning Eco-GENIUM partners as recognised regional pillars;
- Deploy an integrated innovation and entrepreneurship pipeline, from training to validation, incubation and EIT-linked acceleration;
- Anchor universities’ institutional innovation capacity in the regional economic development strategies, so that research and innovation activities carried out within academia contribute directly and measurably to the region’s economic priorities (in industry, technology and raw materials);
- Ensure the long-term institutional sustainability of innovation governance and cooperation with the European innovation and technology ecosystem, as well as of entrepreneurship pipelines, beyond the end of the project.
