Social Innovation, Social Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship Curriculum in the Hybrid Education Environment in Indonesia

As evidenced by the findings of the British Council’s SIHE report for Vietnam there is a growing (but still nascent) research and curriculum landscape, but still a need for enhanced networks and collaboration between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) (as seen in SILKEN), and the need to raise awareness of social innovation amongst HEI leaders. This project aims to begin to fill this gap in the UK/Indonesian contexts by mapping existing social innovation education globally and applying this in the development of a seminar series on social innovation in Indonesia, the UK and beyond. This seminar series intents to promote social innovation in Indonesia, with emphasis on the inclusion of SI in the broader curriculum. It will consider the growing relevance of Impact within HE, especially in Research. In this sense, social innovation is seen as a process for giving value to the research produced by universities not in just commercial terms but increasingly in terms of their societal value. It allows universities to achieve and demonstrate impact more effectively. This aligns with the need for more applied research approaches, focused on action research and co-researcher models, that can create social value as well as new knowledge.

This project is timely given the changing landscape of education and societal structures, resulting from Covid-19, in which a return to a pre-Covid world is not possible nor desirable. The changes to working practices, teaching models, research collaborations, networking and knowledge exchange that this has driven across the higher education sector have been profound. This project allows academics and other stakeholders in Indonesia to start developing social innovation education in Universities that are aligned with the Indonesian government’s new Kampus Merdeka/Freedom Campus Pathfinder programmes, whereby students engage in work-based learning and enrol on the programme itself rather than with HEI. Binus co-designed this policy and is a signatory and supporter of the policy programme, which means that the development of social innovation education and embedding of social innovation in the curriculum could be rolled out through affiliated HEIs across the country.