What is HEInnovate? 

HEInnovate is a free online tool developed jointly by the European Commission (DG Education, Youth, Sport and Culture) and the OECD. Since its launch in 2013, it has supported over 2 000 higher education institutions worldwide in assessing and developing their entrepreneurial and innovative potential. The tool guides institutions through a self-assessment across eight dimensions — from Leadership and Governance to Teaching and Learning, Internationalisation, and Impact Measurement — offering a structured framework for institutional reflection and strategic planning. It is an initiative under the Erasmus+ Programme (Key Action 3), and it is part of the EHESO Strategic Transformation Toolbox for higher education institutions. 

Importantly, HEInnovate is not a ranking or benchmarking tool. It is designed as a self-reflection instrument that helps institutions identify their strengths, uncover areas for improvement, and facilitate internal dialogue among leadership, academic staff, students, and external stakeholders. It can be used individually or in groups, and results remain fully confidential. HEInnovate also provides tailored resources, case studies, and action planning tools to help institutions move from reflection to concrete institutional change. 

What has changed: from general averages to targeted comparisons 

Once users complete the HEInnovate self-assessment, they can see their results for each of the eight dimensions that the tool analyses.

To help users situate those results in a larger context, HEInnovate offers a feature that shows how their results compare to aggregated, anonymised results from other users. Until recently, HEInnovate users could only compare their self-assessment results against the overall average of all completed assessments across the platform. While this offered a general reference point, it provided limited insight for action — a small, teaching-focused institution in Southern Europe and a large, research-intensive university in Northern Europe operate in vastly different contexts. 

With the integration of EHESO data, this has fundamentally changed. Users can now compare their results against more targeted subgroups of institutions, using the following EHESO-derived indicators: 

All comparisons use exclusively aggregated and anonymised data. No individual institution can be identified through the comparison tool, and results are presented only at the group level. This preserves the confidential, non-competitive nature of HEInnovate while significantly enhancing the depth of analysis available to users. 

This new feature transforms the quality of the self-reflection process. When a university sees that its scores on a particular dimension are lower than those of similar institutions — similar in size, country, and disciplinary focus — this provides a far more actionable insight than a comparison against a global average. It can prompt targeted questions: Are institutions like ours investing more in entrepreneurial teaching? Are comparable universities in our region building stronger ecosystem partnerships? 

A significant step for EHESO 

This integration is significant for EHESO for several reasons. By embedding EHESO indicators directly into a widely used institutional tool, the Observatory's data is now actively shaping how institutions understand and develop themselves — not just how policymakers monitor the sector.

Furthermore, it illustrates the interoperability potential of EHESO data. The Observatory was designed to consolidate and integrate diverse data sources into a single platform. The HEInnovate integration shows that EHESO microdata can be connected with other tools and initiatives at European level, creating a more coherent and mutually reinforcing ecosystem of support for higher education.

This development aligns with several priorities of the European strategy for universities, which called for stronger data infrastructure to support higher education transformation. It also contributes to the objectives of the European Education Area by fostering evidence-based decision-making at the institutional level and supporting the European Universities initiative with practical tools for joint reflection and development.

More broadly, as EHESO evolves further to translate information into actionable insights — a direction reinforced at the November 2025 EHESO conference on supporting the Union of Skills — the HEInnovate integration serves as a model for how observatory data can create direct value for institutions, not only for policymakers and researchers.

Looking ahead 

HEInnovate is not a benchmarking tool; rather, it is an institutional reflection and planning framework with a focus on entrepreneurship and innovation. EHESO data is integrated in an aggregated and anonymised way, which does not allow for direct comparison between institutions but helps users contextualise their HEInnovate results within broader sector patterns.

The HEInnovate team continues to explore further triangulation with EHESO data to support more granular analysis of how institutional characteristics influence the adoption and outcomes of innovation strategies. As EHESO's data coverage expands and new tools come online, the opportunities for synergy between the Observatory and initiatives like HEInnovate will only grow.

Higher education institutions interested in exploring these new comparison features can access HEInnovate at heinnovate.eu. Register for free to access the full comparison functionality, which is not available for guest (non-registered) users.