Conference Agenda

Educational innovation is often framed as a necessary response to societal, technological, economic and ecological developments in higher education (Fullan, 2016; Kezar, 2018). Yet many innovation initiatives remain fragmented, short-lived or weakly connected to everyday educational practice. At the same time, higher education institutions operate in an environment saturated with research-based knowledge about change, improvement and implementation. Innovation models form a central part of this knowledge landscape, as they offer theoretically grounded ways of understanding how innovative change unfolds and how it can be guided. Despite the abundance of such models, however, their influence on educational practice remains limited, with innovations frequently persisting as isolated initiatives rather than becoming sustainably embedded. This gap is not merely a matter of implementation failure, but is rooted in the ways educational innovation itself is conceptualized. Innovation models embed assumptions about change, agency, context, and knowledge use, often drawing on disciplinary traditions that are not always made explicit. Against this background, it becomes relevant to examine how innovation models in education have developed over time, which disciplinary traditions they originate from, and to what extend they attend to conditions that enable sustainable education innovation in practice. The study therefore provides a systematic analysis of 19 established innovation models that are frequently referenced in the context of educational change and innovation, examining how educational research has conceptualized the relationship between theoretical knowledge about change and its translation into practical action in higher education.

The objective of the study is to critically examine how innovation models in education conceptualize change, and how these conceptualizations shape their potential to inform sustainable educational innovation in practice. To this end, the study pursues three interrelated aims. First, it analyses how innovation models in education have evolved over time, making visible shifts in underlying assumptions about change and agency. Second, it examines the disciplinary traditions from which these models originate, as these traditions inform how the relationship between knowledge and action is understood. Third, it assesses to what extent these models attend to key aspects required for sustainable educational innovation, by analysing them against five core dimensions identified by Bocconi, Kampylis & Punie (2013).

Conceptually, the study is grounded in a process-oriented understanding of educational innovation. Innovation is not treated as a single event or product adoption, but as a long-term, multi-layered process that unfolds within complex educational systems (Fullan, 2016; Kezar, 2018). The paper deliberately brings together insights from multiple scientific disciplines, reflecting the inherently interdisciplinary nature of educational innovation. This interdisciplinary grounding is important because different disciplines produce different forms of knowledge about how change works, how actors interact, and how action can be supported. In this way, the study examines under what conceptual conditions research-based knowledge about innovation becomes capable of informing practice, thereby contributing to discussions about the relationship between knowing and acting in higher education.

The European and international relevance of this study lies in its broad theoretical scope and its focus on higher education as a shared context across countries. Innovation models are often transferred across national and institutional boundaries without sufficient reflection on their theoretical assumptions or contextual fit. This paper provides a framework for critically selecting or combining innovation models in ways that are sensitive to institutional scale, cultural context and the intended depth of change.

In education systems under a strong and prolonged influence of crisis conditions, undergoing processes of consolidation and organizational restructuring of universities, and, in some cases, relocation processes caused by the ongoing war, ensuring a high level of university competitiveness has become a critical factor, influencing institutional resilience and prospects for future development. Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian higher education system has experienced a pronounced structural contraction, driven by the combined effects of wartime disruption, institutional restructuring, and unfavourable demographic trends. The consequences of this influence are primarily related to (Protsyk, 2025; Dubynska et al., 2025; Guariglia et al., 2025): damage and destruction of universities and financial losses, relocation and migration of the students and academic teachers either abroad or to safer regions within Ukraine, war-related stress among university lecturers and students, decrease in publications and research productivity, relocation of higher education institutions, and ongoing processes of organizational consolidation and reorganization. In recent decades, the concept of university competitiveness has gained increasing attention in the literature on higher education systems, reflecting intensified competition for students, funding, academic staff, and international recognition (Hart & Rodgers, 2024; Maral, 2025). Broadly, university competitiveness is understood as a multidimensional construct capturing an institution’s ability to achieve and sustain superior performance in education, research, and societal engagement within a dynamic and often globalized environment (Pucciarelli & Kaplan, 2016; Musselin, 2018). In this context, composite indices have become an increasingly prominent tool in higher education policy and research, shaping funding allocation, strategic management, and international benchmarking of universities (Shin, Toutkoushian & Teichler, 2011; Hazelkorn, 2015). By aggregating multiple dimensions of performance into synthetic measures, composite indices offer a comparable assessment of institutional competitiveness. However, the growing reliance on international bibliometric databases and global rankings has also raised concerns regarding their limited coverage of national higher education systems, particularly in countries with heterogeneous institutional profiles and uneven research capacity. As a result, large segments of national university systems remain analytically underrepresented, while performance assessments tend to privilege internationally visible research-intensive institutions. Existing empirical literature reflects this imbalance. The majority of quantitative studies either focus on elite universities included in global rankings or adopt case-study approaches centered on a small number of institutions or countries (Marginson, 2014; Hazelkorn & Gibson, 2018). System-wide quantitative analyses that encompass all universities within a national system remain relatively rare. This gap is especially pronounced in contexts of higher education systems, affected by structural shocks, where institutional diversity and asymmetric adaptation processes challenge standard ranking-based assessments. This study addresses this gap by developing a system-wide competitiveness index for all public Ukrainian universities with a focused analysis of research-enhanced competitiveness, examined within a subsample of institutions with sustained research activity. Methodologically, the analysis applies the CRITIC–TOPSIS approach. By doing so, the study contributes to the literature on higher education competitiveness by moving beyond elite-centered rankings and providing a comprehensive quantitative perspective on system-level dynamics under crisis conditions. Based on an analysis of theoretical and empirical studies, four hypotheses have been formulated for verification in this study:

H1. University competitiveness exhibits substantial heterogeneity across the higher education system, reflecting structural differences between HEIs.

H2. Universities with stronger research performance demonstrate higher levels of overall competitiveness under crisis conditions than institutions with weaker research profiles.

H3. The competitiveness of the universities changes significantly in wartime, with the magnitude and direction of change varying across institutions.

H4. The negative impact of war on competitiveness is uneven across dimensions, indicating differentiated resilience patterns within universities.

In recent years, dynamics such as internationalization, competitive pressures, and policy instruments rooted in the knowledge economy have accelerated a shift in university governance from the ideal-typical model of a ‘republic of scholars’ toward a ‘stakeholder organization’ (Bleiklie & Kogan, 2007). In this transition, institutional autonomy has increasingly become the basis for strategic decision-making, while academic freedom has been reframed vis-à-vis the interests of other stakeholders and hierarchical leadership structures (Thoenig & Paradeise, 2016). Many scholars describe this transformation in terms of the centralization of decision-making, the strengthening of hierarchical management, and the standardization and formalization of organizational administration (Maassen & Stensaker, 2019). In practice, these tendencies shape institutional behavior through regulatory reforms, market-oriented funding mechanisms, and various evaluation and measurement systems (Whitley & Gläser, 2007).

In the face of these governance pressures, universities’ responses vary according to their levels of autonomy, institutional profiles, and embedded organizational logics (Olsen, 2005). Because political–administrative regimes, institutional legacies, and path dependencies of national contexts shape the effects of reforms, the resulting outcomes are highly heterogeneous (Zapp, Marques & Powell, 2021). This heterogeneity becomes increasingly complex as universities operate within nested organizational fields, thereby exposing strategic positioning to multi-level environmental demands (Hüther & Krücken, 2016). While this trajectory highlights organizational actorhood, managerial rationalization, and strategic capacity, change processes simultaneously unfold through mechanisms such as loose coupling, ceremonial conformity, and selective coupling, producing heightened hybridity within institutions (Krücken & Meier, 2006). These multi-layered pressures diversify differentiation and positioning strategies at both the organizational and field levels.

In this context, strategic positioning refers to universities’ efforts to generate both vertical and horizontal differentiation by defining distinctive niches, profiles, and focal mix of services under competitive and institutional pressures (Fumasoli & Huisman, 2013). On the one hand, universities are subjected to quality-based stratification through excellence agendas, rankings, and performance metrics; on the other, they seek to identify with specific markets and stakeholder groups through mission statements, strategic plans, and institutional profiles. In this process, positioning becomes a balancing practice situated in the tension between legitimacy and distinctiveness, requiring universities to resemble other institutions while differentiating sufficiently to create sustainable resource niches (Barbato & Turri, 2020).

Today, universities are gaining visibility as organizational actors endowed with strategic decision-making capacity, while simultaneously diversifying their adaptation strategies in response to stakeholder expectations and accountability regimes. This conceptual plurality and multi-field orientation make the literature on organizational actorhood and strategic positioning increasingly fragmented, multi-threaded, and interdisciplinary, thereby rendering a systematic mapping of this scholarship both academically and methodologically meaningful.

This study seeks to uncover the scope, thematic structure, and evolutionary trajectories of this body of literature. Accordingly, the analysis focuses on two core research questions: (i) around which conceptual clusters does the literature on organizational actorhood and strategic positioning cohere, and (ii) what patterns of orientation, differentiation, and development emerge over time. Employing a bibliometric science-mapping approach, the study aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the field’s current structure and dynamics, to generate novel insights into the intersections between organizational sociology and higher education governance, and to provide a systematic assessment of potential future directions for research.