The instrumental role of universities in socio-economic development is today widely recognised. Enhancing links and cross-fertilisation between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and their business environment in the interest of graduates' employability, improved competitiveness and growth is high on the agenda of policy makers and HEIs around the globe.The benefits of university-business cooperation are however as widely recognised as the difficulties that still exist in this field. Lack of integrated approaches and strategic management, inability to bring the different motivations closer, bureaucracy, and need to provide staff and students with the right skills are some of the obstacles generally identified.Challenges increase in countries with complex environments, like Indonesia. In addition to intricate institutional and regulatory frameworks and regional disparity in university capacity, evidence shows a generalised lack of understanding and trust, and little or no involvement of business stakeholders in HEIs’ strategies, what hampers productive university-business interaction. To bring the two sectors together, it is critical to create opportunities for structured vision and common work.SMART proposes a set of focused and complementary activities for enhanced university-business cooperation at Indonesian HEIs to help them identify opportunities for development, generate research-based knowledge, and contribute to the on-going education in the field. The project will facilitate the transfer of good practices from the EU to the PC HEIs; the set-up of professional units (Business Engagement Centres) at 7 PC HEIs and training to their staff to let them accompany students and researchers in making their business ventures a reality. The creation of a University-Business Network, as a platform for dialogue and exchange of experiences, and the Start-Up Nights and other stakeholders' events will also contribute to inspiring nation-wide change.

The role of a modern University in the society is dramatically changed due to economic, social and, as a matter of fact, technological revolutions we are living in. In contrast to a traditional Humbolt University model, Universities across the globe become knowledge service providers to the economy and society at large. In this context, the latest explosion of Massive Open Online educational services/Courses (MOOCs, 2012 was declared as a Year of MOOCs, NYT) is confirming the general trend and opens new avenues for linking Universities and their external customers via powerful ICT means. When Europe is one of the global leaders in MOOC technologies, this innovation is still to come to Southeast Asia and the mission of the COMPETEN-SEA project is to enable the transfer of European experiences to the local partner Universities. The overall project aim is to make a significant contribution towards strengthening relations between higher education systems in Southeast Asia and wider economic and social environment by building organizational, pedagogical and technical capacities in local Universities to design, develop, market and deliver MOOCs for various economic and social problems. The project will implement the following activities:- Regional MOOC SWOT analysis and feasibility study to identify best strategies for educational outreach using MOOCs- Intensive MOOC Capacity Building programme aimed at building local capacities to develop MOOCs addressing local educational needs and deliver them to target users- Development and evaluation of the system of MOOCs addressing urgent socio-economic development needs - Dissemination and awareness raising campaign addressing academic communities in the region, as well as other key stakeholders: policy makers, potential users of MOOCs (e.g. public bodies, NGOs, businesses, etc.), general public. Importantly, the project will undertake efforts to integrate the regional MOOC specialists with the European MOOC movement.

MICROCASA is the first international project aimed at sharing the European experiences and building institutional capacities in Southeast Asia to co-create, promote and deliver short competence-oriented educational units leading to micro-credentials with the goal of solving various economic and social problems. Focusing on different aspects of micro-credentialing, for instance course content co-creation, educational technology, transparent quality assurance, technologies for issuance and verification of digital micro-credentials, the project builds a comprehensive set of competences and technical capacities in Southeast Asian Universities. Leveraging on the partner networks, as well as on the links to the national educational authorities and regional initiatives, MICROCASA has an ambition to have a systemic impact on the ASEAN region as a whole. The project plan builds around the following groups of activities:•Regional Micro-credentials Study and Roundtables, which will allow gathering factual data and experts opinions about the barriers and enablers for introducing micro-credentials into the regional HEIs, as well as to benchmark the regional approaches to the ones in the EU;•Micro-credentials capacity building Programme covering all abovementioned aspects of micro-credentialing;•Pilot development, delivery and evaluation of the set of Digital Competences courses granting micro-credentials;•Targeted awareness raising and dissemination activities spreading the excellence beyond the project consortium.On the European side, the project consortium includes 3 European Universities with complementary competences, Italian NARIC Agency and the quality assurance expert company. The representative group of 6 Southeast Asian University includes central agenda-setting national Universities, as well as Universities with regional development missions.