School2Business – Entrepreneurship Education in the Dragon´s Den Erasmus Project

Project Title

School2Business – Entrepreneurship Education in the Dragon´s Den

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 : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Enterprise, industry and SMEs (incl. entrepreneurship); ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

Both partners, BHAK Steyr (Austria) as well as ROC Mondriaan (The Netherlands), are teaching business related subjects in the upper secondary level. Our students are well trained in skills like text processing, computer based accounting, foreign languages and more. All their gathered skills are highly requested in the labour market. Most of them are starting their careers in companies. But hardly any graduate starts her or his own business. It seems that all the complex contents of our subjects are great to qualify skilled employees, but not really foster an entrepreneural mindset.

The title of our project “School2Business – Entrepreneurship Education in the Dragon´s Den” shows how we want to tackle this challenge. “School2Business” (short S2B) is used as an acronym connected to the business terms like B2B or B2C, showing that we want to link business education in schools directly to starting a own business. The pedagogical approach for this is known as Entrepreneurship Education. Dragon´s Den will be the concerted tool in this partnership to put our students in the position and mindeset of entrepreneurs. (Dragons’ Den is a format in which
entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of venture capitalists in the hope of securing investment finance from them, the Austrian format is known as “2Minuten2Millionen”.)

We pursue the following goals
a) Emplify entrepreneurial spirit of our students with a businessidea competition
b) Emplify presentation skills in foreign languages & digital competencies of our students
c) Exchange of good-practice-examples for entrepreneurship education
d) Implement the experiences of this project sustainably in the curricula of our schools
e) Planning, organizing and implement two Dragon´s Den Events (one in Austria, one in The Netherlands)
f) Realizing four Teacher Job Shadowings

A group of business teachers of both schools (app. 2-4 of each school) will exchange their approaches and good-practises on Entrepreneurship Education during two shortterm Jobshadowings. These mobilities will also be used to prepare the main events of this project: A Dragon´s Den in each country, starting with The Hague in spring 2021 and followed by Steyr in spring 2022. A guidebook will be elaborated which will help the students to develop their business ideas and prepare for the events. In each partnerschool app. 30 advanced students will work on this task. 15 out of them will attend the Dragon´s Den in the other country. Necessary skills will be determined by the teachers in accordance with the national curricula of the business subjects and trained over the duration of the project.

The main specific outputs will be a guidebook for the students preparation for the competitions (including parts of the businessplan, calculations, marketing materials, …), the business ideas & presentations elaborated by the students and a website that documents the process of the exchange, activities as well as the Dragon´s Den events itself.

This school-exchange project will help the participating students to unfold their entrepreneurial spirit. Besides training new skills the participation in the contest sharpens our students entrepreneural view on the business market and should give them more confidence in starting their own companies in the future.

But there is a lot more: The carried-out events and teaching lessons will help us to implement new entrepreneurship education methodologies in our school´s curricula for further generations of students. The Dragon´s Den events will show which digital competencies and language skills needs to be improved. The Job Shadowings will help our business teachers to explore new good-practice-examples for implementing entrepreneurship education as well as teaching computer competencies in our lesson plans. We expect that our goals will contribute to the entrepreneurship acumen of our future students and that some of them will choose to start their own businesses after graduation.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 38802 Eur

Project Coordinator

Bundeshandelsakademie und Bundeshandelsschule Steyr & Country: AT

Project Partners

• ROC Mondriaan