Cooperative education is not only one of the cooperative principles but is also globally accepted as an indispensable tool in achieving cooperative development and success. Despite its recognition by scholars, practitioners, policy makers and cooperative leaders, only limited light has been shed on recent developments, particularly from a comparative, international point of view. The proposed session seeks to start closing this knowledge gap by focusing on current innovative models of cooperative education. This paper overviews several systems of cooperative research, education and outreach in selected European Union and OECD, non-EU countries and identifies common challenges and success factors. It is based on an in-depth study of agricultural cooperatives in the aforementioned regions, which was funded by the European Union (Support for Farmer Cooperatives, 2010-2013). We adopt a systemic view in order to identify the key components of cooperative research education and outreach as well as the ways in which they interact thus creating emerging institutions and networks that further facilitate knowledge creation and sharing. We show that successful systems of cooperative research, education and outreach share a set of five properties that characterize all open living systems. Finally, we discuss whether and under what conditions such properties might be intentionally incorporated into pre-existing systems of research, education and outreach.