|
Start-Up
Communities Leonardo da Vinci
2013 project |
Partners
Consorzio materahub - Industrie
culturali e creative IT-Italy
Amery Brothers Limited GB-United
Kingdom
e-Juniors association FR-France
Dienst Beroepsopleiding vzw EPON BE
Asociación de Empresarios Jóvenes de Valencia
ES-Spain
Foxpopuli SE-Sweden
EUROCONTO BG-Bulgaria
ENIA RDI Ltd CY-Cyprus
Kulttuuricampus FI-Finland
Egitimde Girisimcilik ve Inovasyon Dernegi TR-Turkey
Necmettin Erbakan Universitesi Sosyal ve Beseri Bilimler Fakultesi TR-Turkey
emcra GmbH DE-Germany
EU-Fundraising Association e.V. DE-Germany
Find Invest Grow Limited
GB-United Kingdom
Waterpolis PT-Portugal
D1 Summary
Start-Up Communities (SUC) is a broad EU wide partnership project
designed to identify core and innovative learning and delivery components of a
service/programme/community that best encourages, inspires, supports and
enables successful start-ups and entrepreneurs through life-long
learning relevant and desirable for employability, enterprise and
collaboration. Our project will research these components, each under the
guidance of an expert, throughout our partner countries finding best practice,
case studies, lessons learnt and future opportunities. We will then design a
simple Start-Up Community model based on our findings to guide new SUC across
the EU.
SUC is an environment in which entrepreneurship is supported and
promoted by a team of key actors playing vital roles as training providers,
inspirational models, mentors, possible investors, network facilitators and
other feeders. All within the community are connected and all relationships are
cooperative based and mutually beneficial in the long-term. In this
environment, to foster entrepreneurship, in particular among young people, a
number of learning/teaching/training processes happen and models/tools are
applied.
Entrepreneurship education and the start-up era is
happening all around Europe at different speeds and in different ways. There is
a wealth of best practice, experience and innovation spread across the EU but
not shared.
We want to propose a model containing all the learning elements that
could be useful in a community ready to be engaged on entrepreneurship
promotion and development
The project will search and highlight best practices emerging on
entrepreneurship education (formal, informal, virtual, creative),
make European wide research and comparison and create a useable guideline.
D3 Project objectives and strategy
Problem
Europe needs more enterprises. For over a decade the EC has been
championing measures to create a more business-friendly environment to promote
economic growth and jobs through the creation of start-ups and young
entrepreneurship.
In the Europe2020 perspective, entrepreneurship is a pillar and the
enhancement and development of an entrepreneurial spirit among European
citizens is considered a priority to deliver smart, sustainable and inclusive
growth.
The project will collect, analyse and build upon all those elements that
could be part of a model of local economic development called "Start-up
community". Practical entrepreneurship education will be key in this
process for all involved, together with other lifelong learning components
(informal learning, mentoring, academic education, learning by doing,
counselling, etc.), the project will focus its
research and comparison on these different learning approaches to cope with the
question:
"How can we make our community a favourable field for new companies
and youth entrepreneurialism, promoting a sense of initiative among all our
citizens?"
Objectives
- to create a replicable model, tailored on community specificity, to
promote entrepreneurship by involving local, national and European key actors
in VET sector, business sector, policy making sector, etc.;
- highlight lifelong learning tools, methodologies and approaches that
could have positive effects on the topic fostering the promotion of
entrepreneurship education and KC7;
- collect best practices from all over Europe involving different
actors, working on different levels towards the same objective;
- support young entrepreneurialism and new companies by creating a
fertile community where they can develop their ideas and apply their
competences;
Approach
1. research (qualitative and quantitative) on
different areas and approaches to the problem at local and European level
2. collection of best practices from Europe
selecting solutions applicable to the problem, maintaining flexibility for
local customization
3. consultation and involvement of local target
groups (eg young entrepreneurs) and stakeholders to have feedback and
comparison with real needs
4. using European meetings to deliver training
on project subjects for target groups
5. dissemination and exploitation of results
across all partner countries and towards other EU countries not yet involved in
the partnership and other actors potentially elements of a Start-Up Community
D4 Results and outcomes
Meeting in Finland
- a facebook page
- a a twitter account
- a linkedin group
F Project implementation
F1 Distribution of tasks
The project has a simple scheme that will guide its development during
the two years. In this scheme all partners contribute to project actions and objectives
according to their specific competences, field of intervention in the wider
topic of "entrepreneurship education" and "start-up
communities".
Each partner will be involved in a national research for best practices
on the project mobilities topic (9 topic).
Each mobility will be focused on one of the
project topic.
The partner organising and hosting the mobility has experience on the
topic of the meeting. It will lead the research collecting contributions from
partners.
During the visit two items will occur:
- presentation of all best practices detected
(1 day)
- lectures for local target groups (young
entrepreneurs, startup, other business operators) from partners according to
their specific expertise and the local interest, needs, requests.
At the end of the mobility the partner in charge of the research (the
one hosting the linked mobility) will develop a European report on best
practices detected in the specific topic. These reports will form a large part
of the final document collecting best practices for the model of startup
communities.
In addition to this, each partner will be in charge of country
dissemination, of contents for the project blog coming from its sector of
activity and of other project management actions as planned according to the
monitoring plan.
1. New co-working/crowd-sourcing
philosophy and co-creation methodologies for business and business ideas -
MATERAHUB from Italy
2. Youth Entrepreneurship – early
practical engagement – Amery Brothers from UK & AJEV from Spain (host)
3. Social Entrepreneurship -
FOXPOPULI from Sweden (host) & Amery Brothers from UK
4. Start-up incubators and
Creative Industries - Mentortec from Portugal (host) & Kulttuuricampus from
Finland & FIG from UK
5. Specific groups of
entrepreneurs and networks amongst them
- e-Juniors from France & Embassy of Women Entrepreneurs from Poland
(host)
6. VET course to enhance
entrepreneurship skills - EUROCONTO from Bulgaria & DBO from Belgium (host)
7. Project management as a tool
for entrepreneurs - ENIA Cyprus (host), Waterpolis &emcra Germany
8. Academic
Entrepreneurship/Educational Learning Alliances - Entrepreneurship and
innovation association from Turkey (joint host) & Konya University (joint
host)
9. Fundraising and capital
research - EU fundraising association from Germany & FIG from UK
F2 Cooperation and communication
The strength of the project development and delivery will be assured by
a constant involvement of all partners in decision making and through a
constant activity of communication, agenda setting and reporting. Each partner
by approving the final draft of the proposal accepted its own tasks and
responsibilities and was completely involved in the design and scoping of the
project. The high number of partners required a clear indication of what each
organization could provide by implementing the proposal, and achieve following
it. Apart from common tasks that will be implemented at national level, similar
for all partners, such as internal financial management, communication with stakeholders,
research and analysis at local level, the management of the project will be
organized through a Lead Partner, responsible for the whole partnership, and
other partners appointed for specific tasks such as project dissemination at
European level, document library creation and updating, project reporting.
Communication has a fundamental role in the creation of the cooperative
environment as all partners, apart from the meeting possibilities provided by
mobility, will have to be constantly in touch for the development of the
project through all the possible new means of communication. Each partner will
provide a contact responsible for communicating on a daily basis with project
partners. Communication will happen through virtual conferences, instant
messaging utilities, email, phone call, file sharing, social networks (a
facebook page and a twitter account) and all other possible means to make it
direct, instant and effective and make the ideas and information available to
all immediately. A project blog will be created with all partners contributing
to its update, sharing relevant information and news on project topics of
interest for target groups. Partners will be invited to discuss main issues of
the project and provide opinion and feedback on shared activities. Moreover
each partner in the "national phase" will be asked to inform other
actors in order to start comparison and highlight possible problems emerging
during the implementation of actions. Each partner will also manage their
communications with partners in their own country to actively engage, listen to
and feedback to. Each partner will propose the best way to communicate
partnership actions, results, studies to local actors and stakeholders to make
dissemination profitable.
F3 Participants involvement
The project is clearly focused on entrepreneurship support and KC7 as a
general topic.
Given this, partners staff will be the first
beneficiaries of the whole structure of the project as by performing specific
analysis and best practices research they will be able to increase their
knowledge on other fields of the same sector, understanding other training
methodologies and learning approaches on a common topics (support for
entrepreneurs/start-ups). Their overall skills and competences will grow as the
project develops and as the contributions from all other partners are provided.
Relevant staff of all partners are already
active in the project application development, providing input, how to shape
actions and all agreed on the needs and relevance of the project for their own
context. This improves the impact of our project due to the breadth of
experience housed in our partnership.
Their involvement in the development of activities is clear: each
partner and so each professional of the staff will take care of research
activities (both as lead of a specific action/topic and as partner in other
analysis leaded by other partner), furthermore during each mobility the
partnership will have conference/seminar/lectures open to the target groups of
local entrepreneurs start-up and so each professional will be also involved as
trainer/coach/lecturer on his/her specific information.
Each organization will select the best professional profile to deal with
the two activities. Staff not directly involved with the project will be
invited to attend mobilities when they are hosting creating a collaborative
atmosphere and raising awareness of the project and its outcomes within every
partner country.
As for the monitoring of the project, each organization will nominate a
monitoring antenna to deal with the Quality Plan developed by materahub.
Same will happen for project dissemination at local and European level
in networks of other actors interested on the topic.
F4 Integration into ongoing activities
The project takes advantage of partners’ everyday activities with
start-up and business support.
Each partner will easily integrate project results and studies into own
activities by improving some services, developing new ones, deepening the
impact of local actions with a more European vision.
The idea is for each partner to be able to implement and support the
rise of a start-up community exploiting project results to involve local actors
that could cope on the challenge to reproduce all the best practices detected
at EU level by shaping them according to local needs and specific
characteristics.
SUC is complementary to other EU initiatives such as Erasmus, which many
partners are involved in.
Some examples:
Materahub: together with other local actor the hub is trying to create a
community of people willing to become entrepreneurs and to risk to sustain the economic development of the area. It is also
managing programme like Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs and other
entrepreneurship education programme that find place in this project.
Mentortec acts as a business angel and provides incubator services with
the objective of promoting the creation of new technology-based SME. The
services provided by the company are related to the full life cycle of the
creation of start-ups/spin-offs to their successful functionality.
In order to complement this activity, MentorTec wants to improve its
skills by incorporating the concept of Start-Up Communities (SUC), enlarging
its network of contacts to create its own entrepreneurial environment
(including different agents such as training providers, inspirational models,
mentors, possible investors, network facilitators and other feeders) and
implement new collaborative models that will enable and foster entrepreneurship
in particular among young people.
Amery Brothers: is building support for young aspirant entrepreneurs and
through SUC can learn new functional activities to help young people take the
big step needed.
Fox-Populi: it is using and developing non-formal educational games to
stimulate and boost both creativity and entrepreneurship for young adults and
this is an integral part of the value chain to support start-up communities.
This service could benefit from the overall project approach.
DBO: One of the action fields of DBO is ‘stimulating entrepreneurial
behavior of young people and promoting entrepreneurship in education. For many
years, DBO is running al kind of projects on this topic.
F5 Evaluation
The partnership foresees a specific activity of monitoring and
evaluation of the project, its aims and of the objectives achieved. The
monitoring of the project during its implementation will be assured by a
delivery monitoring plan, composed of tools tailored on specific aspects the
partnership wants to evaluate qualitatively and quantitatively. The plan will
evaluate timing of action, quality of cooperation and communication among
partners (also effectiveness of instruments used), quality and quantity answer
of products and outputs to what has been previewed in the proposal, the
capacity of the project to involve other actors and stakeholders, providing the
right instruments and solutions to intervene during the project implementation
and modify wrong aspects. Moreover the project will be subject to the evaluation
of local participants involved in the local events (to validate the model
created and the approach), the partnership will ask for feedback on how the
project met their expectations and needs, to better understand the direction of
the process and how it can be improved moving forward. Finally the results of
the project will be evaluated by all the organisations involved in order to
promote them for further community initiatives in the same programme or to be
further perfect or better fit to specific local needs.
Our ongoing monitoring and evaluation framework will run in overlapping
cycles to allow the results of the evaluation to have a beneficial impact on
the partnership and its work, but also to strengthen the value of working in
collaboration and informing future activities.
materahub will take responsibility for
monitoring and evaluation of the participants and the partnership, as well as
the reporting of it to all other partners so we may all use it to evolve our
partnership towards a common vision, it will provide an evolved and well
rounded monitoring platform. We will employ group discussions, graduated
feedback forms, free text feedback, written comment on document production and
iterative editing within a pre-described evaluation framework identifying
actions, their owners and their deadlines. We will have periodic questionnaires
for all partners focusing on individual expectations, project development,
project issues, task assignments, opinions about coordinator’s support,
attainment of fixed goals etc.
This framework and its content will be visible to all partners to
promote its position as a living and useful process.
F6 Dissemination and use of results
A dissemination activity is foreseen from the very beginning of the
project development, in order to grant the highest visibility, spread
activities, products and results both at National and at European level with
the objective to involve and make active stakeholders, actors and all the
categories that might be interested in the results of the project (young
entrepreneurs, business associations, VET system organizations and
institutions). Dissemination will be performed at two levels: national
dissemination by each partner in its national/local framework;
European/International dissemination realised by the partnership in a wider
context to reach other countries not involved, European Institutions working on
the specific field, other relevant actors.
Participating organisations can be considered operators of the
"educational world", therefore they will be first able to use the
results of the project in order to increase quality of educational offer
provided, becoming more able to answer to market demand of specific and quality
competences and target groups demand for an effective and valuable training.
Each organisation at the end of the project will benefit from the experiences
shared by the partnership and will become a member of a network of
organizations working to further improve the results obtained, making them more
adaptable to other contexts.
Local communities, as well as the "lifelong learning"
community will be reached by a concrete dissemination activity based on
specific actions the partnership will perform. Results, experiences and final
products will be disseminated through: conferences and workshops during the
project life through meetings with the involvement of local stakeholders
(private and public) to build project scope and achievements and to improve
project strategy in accordance to the broad community feedback on project progress;
media including newspapers, specialized magazines, radio and social media all
as instruments to promote and spread information on how the partnership is
working and which direction the project is following; Internet, including a
blog with information and materials available (project logo, periodical
newsletters, press release) translated in each partner language, in order to
give further diffusion. We will produce
specific materials for dissemination beyond our reports including
e-newsletters, e-flyers and e-posters.
G2 Work programme
