The SEASIN project has supported and promoted social innovation as a means to achieve sustainable and inclusive socio-economic growth, social cohesion and equity in South East Asia, through intercultural, curricular and extracurricular activities. It has achieved this by establishing Social Innovation Support Units (SISU) within the Partner Countries to promote and support University-social enterprise cooperation, social entrepreneurship and graduate employability with a particular emphasis on social innovation projects, incubation and training. A range of learning and teaching tools have been developed, at a formal level through the development of doctoral and postgraduate programmes and more informally through CPD training of stakeholders in social innovation as well as through books and reports and a social innovation platform – a virtual space for sharing social innovation practices and learning outcomes (both at a regional and a local level) as well as facebook and other media. The project has established international cooperation and internationalisation through a network of SISUs across the region and beyond, introducing a training, mentoring and transfer scheme to ensure that there is an effective roll-out that extends outside the original partnership. In addition, the project has specifically involved local communities and in particular disadvantaged groups to give them access to University facilities and strengthen the ties between HEIs and their local social environment. Two HEI partners represented each Partner country (Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand), along with three social enterprise from the region (Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia) who lent their specific experience of delivering social innovation training and other initiatives. The EU Partners – three HEIs (Scotland, Portugal and Spain) and a global social innovation network (UK based) - offered a wide experience of delivering international innovation projects and embedding social innovative initiatives within their own institutions. The project partners have also created a global social innovation network with a virtual platform for users from all over the world to engage with each other, manage projects and access online tools to help support their growth in the future.

Concerning its main activities and methodology, the project will be primarily focused at grasping the needs and priorities of Asian HEIs when it comes to internationalization strategies and tools, so to tailor the subsequent actions and knowledge-sharing programs. After having consolidated a clear outlook of the practices and tools currently adopted in this sector by the universities of Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, the TOOLKIT consortium will start providing training activities in the EU partner universities for Asian IROs on writing/updating the IR strategic plans, educational project-writing and management and management of mobility schemes. The newly acquired skills and expertise in such fields will be then disseminated by local IROs on a national and regional level, through the organization of specific workshops and cascade trainings in their home universities to train additional HEIs from the three countries involved. In the meantime, TOOLKIT Asian partners will also foster the engagement of the entire academic community in IR activities concerning students and teaching staff through events organized by the IROs. Furthermore, to lay the foundations for tangible and long-lasting outcomes, the project is also targeted at other additional stakeholders, such as academic leaders and local policymakers, in order to raise their awareness and commitment to sound, innovative internationalization agendas. Finally, TOOLKIT endeavours in terms of dissemination, exploitation, and sustainability will revolve around the setting-up of two MOOCs, an HelpLine for project management, and a Policy Paper, that will raise the attention of international policymakers on the needs of Asian HEIs.

CHINLONE has been designed as a structural capacity-building project aimed at fostering the modernization and internationalization of MM’s HES, currently in the midst of an epochal reform that mirrors the country’s transition towards democracy. With this in mind, the project tailors its main efforts on the needs and exigencies of three key target groups, represented by local academic leaders, professors and educators, as well as administrative staffs, in order to train them with the most prominent features of the European expertise in terms of academic governance, degree courses designing, and IR management. In doing so, the notions and know-how consolidated through their interactions with European partners will be further capitalized and disseminated on the local dimension, by means of cascade trainings and related activities with additional universities and local HEIs. Hence, CHINLONE is expected to produce a lasting legacy in MM well before the end of its timeline, through the inception of innovative and updated curricula in the strategic fields of studies of humanities and cultural heritage, economics and geography of tourism, and agricultural sciences, so to equip local prospective students with the tools and skills currently demanded by the labour market and economic stakeholders. This approach, most notably, can provide a valuable contribution to MM’s evolution towards a ‘knowledge economy’, paving the way for the introduction of new national policies in the sphere of HE on project-specific topics; which, in turn, will lead to the progressive ascendance of local HEIs in regional education rankings, to a steady increase in the overall number of students enrolling in MM’s universities, and to a parallel boost in international mobility flows to and from the country.