ZoomIn – Turning digital skills into start-up skills for young entrepreneurs Erasmus Project

Project Title

ZoomIn – Turning digital skills into start-up skills for young entrepreneurs

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

As of late 2016, according to Eurostat, youth unemployment (ages under 25) is at 18,8% in the EU28 – ten points higher than the overall unemployment rate – with the highest scores in Greece and Spain (>40%). To combat youth unemployment and stimulate innovation among young people, youth entrepreneurship is thus high on the EU political agenda. At the same time, closely related with the EU goals for employment, growth, and youth entrepreneurship, Europe has made its top priority to promote digital skills in many directions, within the context of the overall goal for the creation of a Digital Single Market. This is clearly echoing the fast transformation of the world as we know it into a digital world, and the economy into a digital economy.
At the nexus of youth unemployment, the need to boost youth entrepreneurship, and the ongoing need for development of digital skills, start-ups seem to play a highly significant role, since they are vital drivers to the EU economy and European innovation, creating the most opportunities for employment, featuring highly innovative services or business models, striving at the same time for significant employee and sales growth. The young (grossly 18-29), as the so called digital natives on the other hand, are supposed to be multi-tasking, having a ‘cherry-picking’ approach in managing information, are serial consumers of digital media, connected in a world of social media, they adapt to constant change, are ‘gamers’ and disruptive considering the ‘corporate’ as unsophisticated and obsolete; a perfect profile that would otherwise fit excellently the entrepreneurial attitude and mind set needed, especially so, in the case of developing a start-up in a digital world. But this is not reflected in the real world.

The proposed project will focus on what young people have, rather than miss, and how their profile as digital natives could be transformed from a set of ‘lifestyle’, rudimentary, rather unstructured digital skills, to targeted, well-informed, critically evaluated and deployed skills, responding to their roving eye and mindsets, so much resembling the entrepreneurial make-up. This will be achieved through the following:

• The development of a methodological framework based on solid secondary and primary research, determining the optimal methodologies and training pathways that couple the start-up phases (Formation, Validation, Growth) with the appropriate knowledge and optimal usage of digital skills, technology and tools

• The development of a modular training provision available online, fleshing out the determined training pathways into training scenarios to be attended by the trainees, challenging their ‘digital wisdom’, adapting their digital skills considering different levels of digital competence to pre start-up and active start-up phases

• A real-life bootcamp process to pilot the training provision, intensively involving 25 young people (18-29) in 4 countries and mixing unemployed, employed, thinking of starting-up in the near future, having founded a start-up/new venture in the previous 2 years, including the deployment of a self-assessment tool to report levels of transformation of digital skills to entrepreneurial and professional facilitators (‘digital wisdom’), alongside the acquired knowledge and impact of the provision

• An assessment account with policy recommendations, further deployment prospects of the training provision, as well as areas in need of refinement for better results, and lessons learned with respect to the assessment of digital skills and competence among the young vis-à-vis their creative start-up potential

The project will build upon the pooling in of digital natives profiles, start-up contexts, and entrepreneurial attitudes among the target group in 4 EU countries (Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain), in order to attain an EU perspective which goes beyond national contexts.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 225052 Eur

Project Coordinator

AARHUS UNIVERSITET & Country: DK

Project Partners

• Meet Magento Association e.V.
• WeLoveStartups
• R&DO LIMITED
• ELLINIKI ETAIREIA THETIKIS PSICHOLOGIAS
• Knowl Social Enterprise for Education and Lifelong Learning
• Innovation Training Center, S.L.
• PRAXIS HISPANIA, S.L.