Sustainable development needs the active participation and collaboration of many different actors in society. The transdisciplinary collaboration between universities and business partners enables both parties to respond to challenges deriving from global transformation processes, to overcome the existing theory practice gap, to promote sustainable and social innovations, and thus to contribute to a transformation towards a more sustainable society, and also can create innovative learning settings in which sustainability-driven entrepreneurs can be educated. This paper asks how education for sustainable socio-economic development in general and for sustainability-driven entrepreneurship in particular can be fostered by innovative collaboration forms between higher education institutions and business partners. Based on results of a needs analysis conducted in the European project CASE “Competencies for a sustainable socio-economic development” and three good practice examples from the CASE project, illustrating different innovative collaboration settings, applied by regional knowledge alliances of heterogeneous stakeholders, the paper discusses key features of Knowledge Alliances and how understanding, sharing and promoting those features can help to upscale collaboration strategies to a transnational scale. In the CASE Knowledge Alliance common experiences are creating a transnational source of good learning and teaching practices. They show how to link the unlinkable via providing particular common thematic issues, innovative learning settings and thus encourage mutual learning processes.