We tried to collect the main takeaways for both user groups: educators who joined the journey and the entrepreneurial experts are who acted as a coach.

ONE TEAM’S JOURNEY…

At the centre of the entreTime programme is the participation in an entrepreneurial team project. In the recent pilot programme, the team “PHANTASTIC 4” worked together to create GO-FAR, a new format for executive training in multiple languages aiming at creating a consortium of universities across European universities for blended short courses combined with travel experiences.

International, inspiring, refreshing, energizing were the most recurrent adjectives for describing the entreTime experience. All of them are committed to going further with the implementation of the GO-FAR concept and embedding what they learnt during this journey in their institution. 

ONE COACH EXPERIENCE…

The role of the entreTime coach is to facilitate the activity of the team – individuals with different backgrounds and from different countries – in deploying a teaching project to embed entrepreneurship within teaching. She or he has to guide the team and gently tease ideas from them.

To understand more about the coach’s experience, we interviewed Alistair Fee, Visiting Professor of Innovation at Queen’s University Belfast and strategy specialist within several capacity building initiatives, entreTime expert and coach in all the pilot programmes.

Alistair, in your opinion, what benefits have coaches gained from the involvement in EntreTime?

Coaches are challenged to create meaningful dialogue, blended with empathy. The process of connecting experts from different countries, cultures and subjects helps coaches to focus on diplomacy and delicacy. Coaches must ask robust and well-considered questions to best direct the team, always remaining unbiased yet helpful. In the meantime, coaches learn to self-examine and reflect on their knowledge, experience, and leadership skills.

What is the impact on their future career or future activities?

Coaches find additional confidence to take an international point of view. It is an opportunity for them to enlarge their network opening to new future opportunities such as conferences, joint ventures, co-written papers and why not an annual workshop around ideas and opportunities.

What can you suggest to university educators for embracing entrepreneurship in their teaching approach? and to university decision-makers?

The world has changed dramatically since March 2020. Economies rely on everyone, especially new graduates and university research teams, to be agile and flexible in the way they think. Universities are part of the overall economic network of nations. When we enrich every student and professor with entrepreneurial knowledge; universities and economies are strengthened.

When university decision-makers commit to entrepreneurship teaching and awareness, they can bring the real world into the lecture theatre and also take everyone out into the real world. This enhances learning, making graduates more employable!

Based on the experience you gained along with the pilot activities, in your opinion, what are the main gains and added values for the participants?

Participants benefit from the training programme by meeting other interested people with similar objectives. By blending different points of view, from four very different countries, everyone gets new insight, and each person is encouraged by other members of the team. In addition, participants realise they are not alone, they are not the only ones trying to do this enormous task. Delegates enjoy being with international colleagues with whom they can share ideas, projects, and ambitions forevermore.

The overall programme teaches us, that there are tried and tested fundamental approaches to raising entrepreneurship awareness in universities and organisations. entreTime teaches additional fresh, sharp, exciting diverse methods and tools that can be used as well. By mixing the two approaches in this new, bright way academics bring business reality into the lecture theatre and project-based learning.

To get additional inspiration, listen to what other participants of our third “enrich your teaching through entrepreneurship” pilot programme say about their entrepreneurial journey and its added values https://entretime.sce.de/previous-pilot-programme/.

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