entreTime continues its roadshow among entrepreneurship stakeholders.

After having presented the lessons learned as Role of Universities in Quintuple Helix context (Professor Slavica Singer and Sunčica Oberman Peterkaat from Strossmayer University) at the last XI RED Conference, the entreTime team managed a parallel session within the XX THA conference, held in Florence on June 27-29 th.
Our pool of experts (Prof. Slavica Singer, Milena Stoycheva – CEO of Junior Achievement Bulgaria- , prof. Klaus Sailer and dr. Audrey Stolze – Strascheg Center for Entrepreneurship) provided a nutshell insights about the role of universities in society and in an open entrepreneurship ecosystem model as a driver of local economic development and on how to exploit the entretime offering for this purpose.

It’s all about #shared vision, commitment and trust. An outstanding fishbowl conversation about the role of Higher Education Institutions in fostering resilient learning communities and the importance of properly valuing education geared the participants to share ideas and practices.

Moderated by Andrew Harrison with 43 registered participants across Europe, the first entreTime dialogue was an opportunity to go more in-depth on how to engage people in networks and how to revise the HEI’s governance to grasp this challenge. 

Many thanks to Klaus Sailer, Strascheg Center for Entrepreneurship, Slavica Singer, J.J. Strossmayer University of Osijek, Solène Moutier, EIT Raw Materials, Dana Redford, PEEP, Elin McCallum, Bantani Education for their contribution and have shared their experience and to the EntreComp Synergies for having co-organised the event.

Interesting hints for future discussion have been raised:

“We must rethink entrepreneurship education to not transmit only knowledge, but make it experiential, and change habits. We need to foster the development of competences (entreComp).”

Integration and mapping of enterprise skills into existing curricula – supporting colleagues’ understanding of enterprise and entrepreneurship

Post pandemic landscape – What will EE look like in 5 years? Will we as a community of practice be reactive or proactive?

entreTime organised a workshop within the parallel session “Overarching policies and underlying theories” to further discuss how to exploit a Teaching through Entrepreneurship approach to becoming more Entrepreneurial Universities

The 19 participants, educators from European HEIs shared the barriers they daily face in enhancing their students’ entrepreneurial spirit. Lack of understanding of entrepreneurship and practice is still acknowledged as the main hurdle to be embedded as strategic leverage in teaching.

Mats Westerberg and Louisa Huxtable-Thomas presented the latest entreTime experiences on how this can be achieved.

5 working groups started to design countermeasures, identifying a wide portfolio of practices that can be used for launching new initiatives for fostering the entrepreneurial competences of educators.   

entreTime is launching a series of dialogue events “Time to foster your entrepreneurial mindset”.

These online workshops will contribute to the dialogue on how to move towards more resilient communities and supportive ecosystems for entrepreneurial culture.

Participation in the workshops is free of charge

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Mats Westerberg (Luleå University) and Louisa Huxtable-Thomas (Swansea University School of Management) will represent entreTime introducing our learning& experience in fostering an entrepreneurial mindset.

The workshop, scheduled on May 11th, aims to share practices on how to embed the Teaching Through the entrepreneurship approach to advance the institutions’ third mission and equip non-entrepreneurship educators with the needed competences.

More details https://blog3e2022.files.wordpress.com/2022/04/3e-2022-programme-250422.pdf

Considering Entrepreneurship as the capacity to act upon opportunities and ideas to create value (social, cultural, financial), in the EntreComp framework resilience is a core component of “motivation and perseverance”, one of the 15 entrepreneurial competences.

It is acknowledged that to be determined to go further with achieving long term aims, it is crucial also to “be resilient under pressure, adversity, and temporary failure”.

Resilience is becoming even much more relevant in the post-covid world characterized by pervasive technology and fast-changing scenario/societal issues.

A recent multiple case study carried out among a sample of university students analysed entrepreneurial resilience, as a multidimensional construct that involves social, cultural and psychological processes.

Moving towards a border construction of entrepreneurial resilience, not limited to the business dimension, but as the capacity to face, overcome and project oneself in the future, the study has demonstrated that it is built through intrapersonal and exopersonal processes and outlined a comprehensive model in emerging adulthood to face adversity and build life projects.

Here the full paper: https://www.mdpi.com/1513656.

Entrepreneurship education is recognised as the main driver for building up a more resilient society.

To develop a comprehensive strategy for further promoting it, within the COSME Programme, the European Commission funded the Peer-Learning Activities in Entrepreneurship Education and in Women’s Entrepreneurship project (2018-2021).

A key output of this action is the “Guide for fostering entrepreneurial education” that outlines 5 main intervention areas where decision-makers and stakeholders could intervene:

  • Develop EE competence of leaders and teachers in education institutions
  • Encourage cooperation of EE stakeholders about policies and curricula
  • Communicate what EE is and what benefits it brings
  • Measure and compare EE practice and impact in pan-European research
  • Share EE knowledge and experience to enhance teaching and learning

Here the full guide https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/734447fa-58a7-11ec-91ac-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-246062167

Here you find the third entreTime-Newsletter.

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/.

On the 2nd of December, the last workshop of the third entreTime training programme occurred.

With an optimized dynamic provided by the learnings of the previous two pilots, a group of motivated and committed participants from different institutions and realities worked together towards a more entrepreneurial mindset during eight weeks.

The 3rd pilot was held by five European Institutions, the Strascheg Center for Entrepreneurship, in Germany, Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, Lulea University of Technology in Sweden, J.J. Strossmayer University in Osijek in Croatia and University of Aveiro in Portugal.

More than one hundred registrations, a reserve list of participants interested in joining and participants that weren’t selected but asked for access to the platform resources, the first webinar gathered the 35 participants selected. Beginning on the 6th of October, 35 participants joined the international teams and had the opportunity to learn and to share through different formats and resources: from webinars, workshops, project development, MOOCs, LoopMe, with a combination of theory, hands-On and feedback, setting and providing the optimal environment for learning.

The 25 participants experienced and completed an immersive journey with the aim of upskilling and upgrading their pedagogical tools by providing a comprehensive training package with several international experts and with the support of 7 coaches from the five countries that promoted this cohort.

The entreTime training following the previous pilot format was held fully online allowing the participation of educators from different countries besides the hosting ones of the pilot, as from South Africa, Mozambique and Belgium, allowing a richer experience considering the cultural, scientific and personal diversity of each.

The third pilot emphasised the relevance of the training to improve and boost the entrepreneurial mindset in Higher Education Institutions and the quality of the entreTime model of teaching through entrepreneurship.