Enabling Youth Entrepreneurship Support Group Erasmus Project

Project Title

Enabling Youth Entrepreneurship Support Group

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 addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy)

Project Summary

The Enabling Youth Entrepreneurship Support Group project is the result of a 4 European business incubators collaboration, having various approaches in working with youth enterprises: one cooperative from Italy (Impact HUB Syracuse) – member of one of the largest co-working spaces networks in the world, the Macedonian Foundation Business StartUP Center from Bitola – having wide experience in developing hundreds of businesses in very diverse industries, a higher education & VET institution in Netherlands functioning as an alternative business school (Team Academy Netherlands) and one NGO organized as a business incubator for young people in Romania (CROS, the Alternative University program).

The partnership developed was meant for the partners to gain expertise to help them build their capacity, being sustainable and scale, and to develop innovative and easy to share practices (the Incubation-outside-the-Box toolset) for youth incubation programs designers around Europe.
The toolset is built based on the experience of the four participating organisations, but also taking into consideration the current state-of-the-art of youth incubators and tested within some of the most important European entrepreneurship hubs (Sicily, Bucharest and Amsterdam). The toolset was disseminated to European universities, business incubators, foundations, investors and governments, willing to design and develop youth entrepreneurship enabling programs. To assure transfer capacity and the sustainability of the project, we developed a support service for those who want to better implement the methodology developed and use the Incubation-outside-the-Box toolset (a book) and will continue to develop a training for facilitators.

The EYE Support Group core group is made of 12 staff members of the four partner organizations (3 people from each organization), all having experience in creating and developing different incubation programs and in working with young entrepreneurs, as trainers, educational, service or product designers, youth workers, facilitators, business coaches or consultants, networkers and partnership developers, program and project managers or developers, innovators, or strategists.

The flow of activities consisted in five main type of activities: (1) Project management and implementation activities, (2) Intellectual Outputs development and delivery (the Incubating Incubation report, a research on youth entrepreneurship, enabling programs around Europe and the Globe and the state of the art when it comes to incubation for youth – an online publication and infographic associated, and the Incubation-outside-the-Box ToolSet – educational physical product(a game), website and support service associated(a book)), (3) A transnational project meeting dedicated to dissemination and sustainability measures design, (4) Dissemination workshops and online specific activities (five dissemination workshops held in 4 European cities), and (5) Engaging learning activities – three sharing sessions based seminars, each with a study visits associated and an expert training.

The project used innovative methodologies for every stage of the project. To ensure the successful implementation of the activities, we used the work breakdown structure organization method. To develop the incubation-outside-the-box toolset, we used product design and manufacturing methodologies, such as design thinking and design for six sigma.To make the best out of this collaboration, throughout the entire project and in sharing sessions we used partnership brokering and facilitation methods, while in the dissemination workshop we used co-creation methodologies in order to gather valuable feedback from main users.

The project impacted the participating organizations, in the first place, by raising their business incubators performance measured by the number of enterprises developed each year, their generated revenue and the time of an incubation cycle. Also, this project raised the awareness and credibility of the organizations involved and opened the door for new international collaborations on similar topics. Moreover, the dissemination workshops hosted by other similar organisations helped and inspired them to create better incubation processes. Finally, we created an easy to use toolset that ensures knowledge transfer for any interested organisation. With the the support service created we will help other youth business incubation programs to be born, grow and scale, thus promoting youth entrepreneurship incubation programs enabled, as a key tool in tackling unemployment, across Europe.

Looking at the European level, we believe that the know-how transfer facilitated by the Incubation-outside-the-Box toolset is of real value for business incubation and entrepreneurial education programs with special address to youth, but also as a model of cooperation among peers as a communities of practice knowledge sharing and building.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 116326,86 Eur

Project Coordinator

Centrul de Resurse pentru Organizatii Studentesti & Country: RO

Project Partners

• FOUNDATION BUSINESS STARTUP CENTER BITOLA
• Team Academy Netherlands BV
• THE HUB SICILIA SOCIETA COOPERATIVA