SUNRISE comprises nine smaller-sized and strategic European Universities with a STEAM focus located in regional (non-metropolitan) areas sharing common goals, challenges, and values. The alliance is dedicated to enhancing the strategic role model for smaller universities in fostering the development and prosperity of sustainable regional economies and societies. SUNRISE Alliance members will learn from each other and complement their competences to enforce the taken modernization process. The synergetic, complementary approach will increase the capacity of territory-rooted universities to improve their higher education (HE) activities to the benefit of all students, researchers, regional stakeholders and all development policies and European strategies, as well as to facilitate the engagement of knowledge-creating actors. Thus, the universities within SUNRISE set out to address all four missions of higher education institutions (HEIs), i.e. education, research, innovation and service to society. They play a pivotal role in actively shaping the EU’s Triple Transition addressing digital, green and societal challenges that European societies are faced with. SUNRISE provides a bundle of concrete measures in six work packages with the goal to increase the number of flexible and innovative study programmes, the student mobility, and alternative learning pathways. They want to share and jointly upgrade their research capacity to enhance their collaboration in research addressing the EU’s Regional Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3). Together with 48 associated partners which act as stakeholders for the alliance, SUNRISE will work on a collective development of distinct regional excellence that better connects the world to the SUNRISE regions and brings, vice versa, the diversity of the SUNRISE regions to the world. In this way, SUNRISE-Alliance will act as a bridge builder, change agent, facilitator and enabler in a very broad sense.