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Whereas the economic impact of universities is undisputed, the social impact of universities remains vague. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how universities influence firms’ social engagement. Based on survey data of more than 7,000 German firms, our results reveal that universities positively affect firms’ social engagement mainly through teaching activities. Hence, our findings give impetus to a reinforcement of the university mission ‘teaching’ as a central lever for social change and increased social awareness as well as to a reorientation of the third university mission toward social needs. This paper thereby contributes to our understanding of the changing missions and values of universities and adds to the literature by exploring the underlying mechanisms of the social impact of universities. We conclude the paper with fruitful future avenues of research.

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) swiftly changed almost all aspects of our lives and society. In this paper, we depict course adjustments that we made to an undergraduate digital innovation course project, called Innovation Farm (IF), in response to the pandemic. Designed as an in-person course project, IF requires students to create AIpowered Android apps to address important social issues. As stay-at-home orders came into effect in March, 2020, we shifted the course to the online modality refocused its student topics to address social issues that COVID-19 has engendered. Accordingly, we also discuss three challenges that we faced and the strategies we employed to cope with them; namely, framing students' social innovation topics in the COVID-19 context, using virtual studios for online groupwork, and hosting a virtual pitch competition. Surprisingly, these strategies not only addressed the challenges but also created unintended benefits and opportunities. We hope to encourage educators to consider the possibilities in transforming challenges to opportunities during these unprecedented times.

Les recherches en éducation s’enracinent profondément dans la réalité complexe des phénomènes d’enseignement et d’apprentissage, convoquant les acteurs de la recherche et de l’éducation à appréhender cette complexité dans un travail commun. L’inscription de ce travail dans une perspective participative ou collaborative nécessite une intelligibilité accrue des processus collaboratifs à l’oeuvre et des défis qu’ils posent aux différents acteurs. Nous proposons dans cet article un modèle théorique des processus de collaboration fondé sur une construction épistémologique et méthodologique croisant des cadres théoriques issus de l’anthropologie, de la psychologie, de la philosophie, de la didactique et des sciences du langage, avec pour ambition de créer une meilleure intelligibilité des processus à l’oeuvre dans les recherches participatives en éducation.

This book explores the nexus between professional technical societies and engineering education by examining several societies' efforts to promote and support engineering and engineering education in the areas of pre-university education, university education and informal education through programs and activities designed to leverage social innovation. Professional societies are in a unique position to support and contribute to engineering education, and have dedicated substantial resources to social responsibility programs and activities that promote engineers and engineering. The book is chiefly intended for engineers, engineering educators, staff members of professional technical societies, and for the broad range of scholars whose work involves technology education and education policy.

The dependence on digital technologies has seen a significant increase during COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure that social connectivity and work goes on, in spite of lockdowns and the physical controls on movement. Though digital learning is expected to create abundant life-long learning opportunities for learners worldwide in this challenging time, there is a danger to further impose inequalities and inadequate access to quality education and life-long learning for the unconnected or poorly connected population. This paper shares our experience of reengineering a MOOC platform as `Community led MOOCs' to serve the learning needs of most under represented single mother communities in Bario - a remote settlement of Kelabits in the Borneo Island of Malaysia. This paper then explores TRIZ based heuristic models to address the socio-technological barriers to lifelong learning and proposes TRIZ principles that can trigger social innovation and creativity in designing lifelong learning solutions for rural communities.

This study analyses the importance of teaching social entrepreneurship in state universities. A survey was applied to university students to find out if personality traits are related to the characteristics of social entrepreneurship. This was achieved through Alpha Cronbach and Pearson/Spearman correlation analysis. The results show that students have the personality traits to become social entrepreneurs. However, social entrepreneurship courses are not taught in universities of Tijuana city. Therefore, it is strongly suggested to teach social entrepreneurship in universities of the city and the state because students possess social entrepreneurship traits and are interested in the subject.

The idea of social innovation has become increasingly popular in recent years, and as often happens with popular concepts it risks become overloaded. This happens, for instance, when social innovation is seen as the “soft” and humanistic alternative to versions of innovation dominated by science and technology. There has been a fast growing literature on social innovation, some of it in academic publications but perhaps most of it published by think tanks, semigovernmental agencies, and other organizations. Many different institutional fields for social innovation are discussed in the literature (Moulaert et al. 2013). Education is one of them, but much less frequently treated than fields like housing, intercultural relations, environmental issues, and childcare.

The socioeconomic challenges caused by aging populations have encouraged many countries to reevaluate the place of the elderly in society as well as to adopt measures in encouraging them to be participative. In recent decades, crowdsourcing has been identified as a rapid growth of innovative Internet-based information and communication technologies in giving the opportunities to educational organizations to reach their goals. With their accumulated skills and knowledge, academic retirees can be resourceful to society. However, their knowledge and experiences seem to be undervalued and underutilized. Retired academics have better opportunity to extend their contribution in the society as their valuable knowledge is more appreciated than people from other background. Retired academics tend to be able to fulfill their desire for professional continuity following retirement more markedly than people from other backgrounds. This paper analyzes the use of crowdsourcing in educational activities, especially for the academic retirees. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to take an exploratory look on how educational organizations use crowdsourcing as part of their activities at the present time, and to suggest how the practice of crowdsourcing may expand to other educational activities in future.

Educating social innovators in higher education is of great importance as many societal challenges exist. This study combines experiential learning with ICT tools to provide students with the needed competences and experiences to solve societal challenges. We employ this approach in an innovative course, named Experts in Teamwork (EiT), which follows the experiential learning cycle. The participants of this study are undergraduate students interested to learn how they can solve societal challenges. Specifically, 26 students with various background and nationalities participated. A collaborative platform was developed that supports teamwork and cooperation, as well as the social innovation process. The findings show that this approach can influence positively learning outcomes and increase students' engagement and motivation with both social innovation and the learning process. Also, students' creativity was increased leading to the development of better solutions. The overall outcomes contribute to theoretical and practical development, to allow educators to take appropriate measures to enhance students' learning experience and foster social innovation through ICT.

“Many suppliers and users of social research are dissatisfied, the former because they are not listened to, the latter because they do not hear much they want to listen to” (Lindblom & Cohen, 1979: 1). As mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book, the recent events of global financial crisis and a series of Occupy Wall Street protests have raised reflections of business management education on MBA trainings. The question of whether management research and education can be a facilitator toward events that would eventually destroy the world economy or a facilitator toward achieving social value and human glory has been raised with those reflections. MBA graduates should not be used as profiting tools for big corporations anymore. Moreover, the separation between management theory and industry practice has, for a long time, caused a dilemma with regard to the difficulties inherent in dialogue between academia and industry. There have been urgent calls to embody management research into applicable industry knowledge in order to minimize the gap in between the two (Anderson, Herriot, & Hodgkinson, 2001; Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001; Van de Yen & Johnson, 2006).