**Preface to "Higher Education in Innovation Ecosystems"**

Societal changes are leading to the demand for broader roles for universities, and this also calls for, and leads to, substantial changes within the internal fabric of the university. Significant innovations in both society and universities necessitate a renewed understanding of the social missions of higher education in society. Among both researchers and policymakers, universities have been considered increasingly important for regional economic growth and innovation, sustainable development, and global partnership building. We believe that all these dimensions of universities' societal engagement, requiring various innovations in higher education, can be integrated into the framework of innovation ecosystems. This has motivated our editors to organize this Special Issue in order to tackle a new research agenda: higher education in innovation ecosystems.

Dealing with interactions between innovations in higher education and innovation ecosystems in research is by no means easy. While innovations in higher education and innovation ecosystems, as buzzwords, have captured the imagination of policymakers, both are loosely used, without a consensus on their actual meanings. By collecting 16 research papers which contribute to discussions on the theme of the Special Issue, from theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives, we advance both conceptualization of higher education in innovation ecosystems and empirical research on the topic.

The 16 articles, contributed by 44 authors from 10 countries, can generally be divided into four categories: 1) new demands for universities arising from the transformation in the society towards innovation ecosystems, 2) transformations within higher education responding to emerging societal demands, 3) dynamics of interaction of universities with other innovation actors in transnational contexts, and 4) academic and student mobility for higher education innovation.

As outcomes of synthesizing the collected articles in the Special Issue, we re-defined the concept of innovation ecosystem and identified three roles of universities in innovation ecosystems in the Special Issue Editorial. These constitute an overarching framework that facilitates readers to comprehend the individual articles in the Special Issue and find synergy among them.

We hope that our Special Issue will inspire and encourage more scholars to join this research area. Although the Special Issue primarily targets academic readers, it is also relevant for policy and managerial audiences.

In closing, we would like to thank the editorial team of the *Sustainability* journal for inviting us to be guest editors for the Special Issue. We thank all the authors and reviewers for their valuable contributions. We also acknowledge the financial support for the organisation and publication of the Special Issue from the project National Education Sciences "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" of China, under grant number BIA190166, and from the project of Shenzhen Social Sciences Association, under grant number SZ2018A009.

> **Yuzhuo Cai, Jinyuan Ma, Qiongqiong Chen** *Special Issue Editors*
