Innovative Higher Education Institution or Innovator in the Higher Education Institution?

Based on a case study, this contribution provides HEI s with an ideal type model for assessing their innovative ability for cooperative innovations with enterprises. While previous approaches mainly focus on analysing innovation-supporting frame conditions and, on this basis, try to determine the extent of innovative ability, this contribution looks onwards. Therefore, it equally takes the professor acting as an innovator into focus. This creates a bottom-up perspective that shows that different ideal types can usually be found within one HEI since the professors’ individual innovation ability and willingness to innovate can vary significantly from another. The case study results further show that innovative ability often does not arise due to the combination of innovation-supporting frame conditions and the professor acting as an innovator, but simply by the professor acting as an innovator without support. However, acting as an innovator without support leads to dissatisfaction with the HEI and a medium to long-term decline in innovation cooperation activities. Only by analysing both the innovation-supporting frame conditions and the person-specific innovative ability as well as their interplay, the HEI gets a realistic picture of its innovative ability.