Promoting and Implementing Training on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity in Higher Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Promoting and Implementing Training on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity in Higher Education

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 higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Cooperation between educational institutions and business; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

PITCH: Promoting and Implementing Training on entrepreneurship, innovation and Creativity in Higher education

The project aims at developing innovative teaching and learning approaches for entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation education in Higher Education.

Even though in the recent years several entrepreneurship courses have been developed in HEI worldwide, a cross-cutting approach is missing to integrate entrepreneurship in an overarching domain-independent approach.
Hence entrepreneurship, in most cases is regarded as a discrete domain or is often connected to business studies or economics only.
The aim of PITCH is to introduce entrepreneurship, and with it sense of initiative, creativity and innovation as a “key competence” in an overarching approach which can be transferred to a large variety of research fields and study domains in European Higher Education.

This will be achieved with the help of an innovative, self-directed (blended) learning approach for students and educational personnel at the interface of Higher Education and business.

Entrepreneurial competences are hardly to be acquired in frontal teaching lessons or self-learning exercises.
The ideal learning contexts to acquire these competences are the informal/non-formal ones such as learning labs, incubators in combination with internships or mobility. Hence, the PITCH project aims at setting up an innovative blended learning approach, which includes experiential and practical learning in different learning environments.

However, it is a challenge to set up learning pathways to facilitate the acquisition of relevant knowledge, skills and attitudes in this rather heterogeneous field. Only singular attempts have been made to systematically include the development of these competences in curricular or extracurricular HE courses.
The validation (here the assessment and documentation) of these competences requires an appropriate competence framework system to give evidence of students’ development, to connect them to existing certification systems and to offer a European wide validation approach.

PITCH will develop and pilot an approach to tackle this issue based on a long-term partnership of academia, business and educational partners.

Based on a sound stocktaking on successful approaches on entrepreneurship education modules and courses it will set up a framework of competences on entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, using on the one hand the EntreComp descriptive framework and on the other hand the LEVEL5 validation system. Both systems have been largely applied in previous EU-funded projects on entrepreneurship education.

A modular, blended learning and training approach will be developed combining face-to face, e-learning and practical learning in incubators, in internships and learning in mobility, thus creating interfaces to ERASMUS mobility programmes.

The learning and training offers will also be delivered on state-of-the-art learning technologies providing contents, courses, e-portfolios and validation interfaces as open educational resources (OER) for 18 trainers who will transfer the PITCH approach in their trainings in HEI; 12-15 students will carry out a specific study mobility in the framework of an intercultural design thinking programme.

The PITCH courses and modules will involve 75 students from six universities in five EU member-states and one candidate country.
Students of different sciences will develop PITCH projects along an innovative blended learning concept based on transferrable study units that can be integrated in the formal curricula and on an experiential learning approach in European universities.
Competences will be validated and connected to European validation and certification instruments.

The PITCH partnership is consisting of HEI from DE, GR, LT, PT which cover a large geographical scope and several cross-cutting disciplines from economics, natural, economic and social sciences.
The partnership is completed by a young unversiy spin-off working on innovation management (IT) and a European cooperative with a large European network in the field of competence-oriented learning and validation (DE).

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 299126 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET DUISBURG-ESSEN & Country: DE

Project Partners

• VILNIAUS UNIVERSITETAS
• ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS
• BLENDED LEARNING INSTITUTIONS COOPERATIVE
• SMART REVOLUTION SRL
• INSTITUTO POLITECNICO DE LEIRIA