Giving not just a few, but many an active role as innovators or change agents in the innovation process is the basic idea behind the democratisation of innovation. Civil society actors, such as students or committed citizens, are increasingly becoming important impulse generators and change agents, and thus important active players in the emergence and development of innovations. New innovation actors are appearing on the scene and new opportunities for innovation cooperation are opening up, e.g. at the interface between the education system and the economic system.

However, this process is still too little recognised and used in view of the major societal challenges of the future, such as climate change, migration or fragile energy supply.

For our discourse on the future, we focus on the cooperation of students and companies in the joint development and initiation of sustainability-oriented innovations. In this way, in times of great challenges for the future, the social opportunities of a broadening (democratisation) of innovation to accelerate transformation processes and achieve sustainability goals are to be illuminated.

It is the task of the planned Future Discourse to discuss the potentials of new innovation actors and novel forms of co-innovation processes using the example of structured cooperation between students and companies in initiating and developing sustainability-oriented innovations. The training of change agents, i.e. people who actively support an innovation process, associated with these co-innovation processes will also be reflected upon, and the conditions and strategies for the dissemination of new types of innovation cooperation at the interface between the education and economic systems will be discursively examined.

The aim of the academic discourse and reflection is also to examine whether and to what extent there is a need for changed funding and support systems for these new innovation actors and co-innovation processes.

The future discourse will therefore discuss how additional innovation potentials can be tapped by democratising innovations for regions and what framework conditions must be in place for these co-innovation processes to make demonstrable contributions to regional innovation capacity and to solving sustainability challenges, such as coping with climate change.