ESDST’2026

Résumé

Innovation ecosystems in emerging economies are increasingly theorized through the Triple Helix model (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 1995; Etzkowitz, 2020), identifying dynamic interactions between universities, industry, and government as the fundamental driver of sustainable knowledge-based development. Operationalizing this model within private higher education remains structurally challenging due to limited public research funding, weak integration into national innovation frameworks, and absent governmental partnership mechanisms (Ben Hassen, 2020; Guesmi & Guesmi, 2021). Private universities are consequently compelled to adopt bottom-up self-initiated strategies to construct legitimacy within innovation ecosystems (Etzkowitz, 2020; Perkmann et al., 2021).

This paper argues that the hackathon constitutes a powerful bottom-up catalytic mechanism through which private universities can progressively construct Triple Helix dynamics, establish research credibility, and build structured entrepreneurial pathways (Cobham et al., 2022; Gama et al., 2021). This is substantiated through a longitudinal qualitative case study of H12 Innovation — a national hackathon organized by ESPRIT, a leading Tunisian private engineering school — across three editions (2024–2026), each anchored in a distinct region confronting acute socio-territorial challenges: urban waste in Sfax (2024), AI-driven heritage valorization in Kasserine (2025), and AI applications for environmental health in Gabès (2026).

The hackathon activated all three Triple Helix dimensions progressively. The University Dimension evolved from basic academic framing toward genuine research partnership. Edition 2 integrated real archaeological data from a professional archaeologist’s doctoral thesis on the Sbiba site, grounding student innovation in scientifically validated content. Edition 3 consolidated academic credibility through a data governance constraint limiting AI-generated data to 15% of total datasets, institutionalizing research integrity, data literacy, and ethical AI principles as explicit outcomes.

The Industry Dimension was constructed through structured coaching sessions, thematic seminars by engineers and entrepreneurs, real industrial datasets, and multi-stakeholder panels, creating tangible knowledge transfer channels through authentic collaborative engagement.

The Government and Society Dimension was operationalized through strategic alignment with national public policy imperatives — waste management, heritage preservation, and industrial pollution — enabling organic insertion into national development conversations without requiring formal state recognition.

Beyond Triple Helix activation, H12 Innovation functioned as a structured entrepreneurial pathway addressing Tunisia’s documented entrepreneurship education deficit. Edition 1 cultivated entrepreneurial thinking through intensive ideation. Edition 2 developed disciplinary-grounded prototyping. Edition 3 operationalized market validation through field data collection and pitch presentations before professional juries, replicating early-stage startup development.

Findings from participant observation, project analysis, partner feedback, and pitch video assessment demonstrate that H12 Innovation successfully activated Triple Helix dynamics through a self-initiated bottom-up approach, generating research-validated deliverables, sustained industry-academia co-construction, and significantly heightened entrepreneurial intention among participants.

This paper concludes that the hackathon — designed with progressive complexity, territorial anchoring, real data partnerships, and multi-stakeholder engagement — represents an accessible, agile, and pedagogically powerful bottom-up strategy for operationalizing Triple Helix dynamics in private higher education. Implications for innovation policy and university-territory-industry ecosystem development in Tunisia and comparable emerging economies are discussed.