The European Union’s activities in supporting the education of entrepreneurs show how important collaboration in education is for innovation.
The European Union (EU) supports entrepreneurship to boost innovation, job creation and help address global challenges such as climate change. In this regard, education for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship plays an important role. Two EU programmes in particular represent this well: the ongoing call of the Higher Education Institutions (HEI) Initiative of the European Institute for Technology and Innovation (EIT) entitled ‘Innovation Capacity Building for Higher Education’ and the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs (EYE) scheme.
The mandate for the EIT’s work in entrepreneurship education is stated in the current Strategic Innovation Agenda (SIA, 2021-2027), which sets the priorities for the EIT. It says that the EIT must ‘support HEI to strengthen their innovation and entrepreneurial capacity and to strengthen the integration and contribution of HEI to innovation ecosystems’. Therefore, the EIT launched the HEI Initiative to bring together HEIs in innovation value chains and ecosystems in Europe, to ultimately support HEIs in their contributions to the twin green and digital transitions. The initiative is now running as a pilot programme for three years with a first call in 2021, a second call that is ongoing until 28 February 2022 and a third one in 2023. After that the EIT will evaluate the initiative and possibly continue it until 2027. In order to participate, HEIs have to form a transnational consortium and explain how they will increase their innovation and entrepreneurial capacity in a long-term view to 2030. The applicants can use the HEInnovate self-assessment tool to inform their application. Concretely, the EIT HEI Initiative can fund activities, such as fostering institutional change, developing innovation and business support services, creating and disseminating knowledge or enhancing the quality of entrepreneurship education. Concrete examples of projects funded by the EIT HEI Initiative can be found on their website. The current call for proposals is set to fund up to 40 new consortia of HEI, each financed with up to €1.2 million for a period until mid-2024. Potential applicants further have a dedicated online networking platform available to find partners for a potential consortium. This platform and the call are open until 28 February 2022.
Next to this large-scale institutional entrepreneurship programme, the EU also offers support for individual young entrepreneurs to learn and develop competences (according to the European Entrepreneurship competence framework ‘EntreComp’). One such scheme is the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs (EYE) programme. Initiated in 2009, the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs programme was developed within the framework of the Small Business Act (SBA) for Europe under the COSME programme. Despite the name, the programme institutionally has no link with the Erasmus+ programme, but the principle remains similar: Young people go abroad for a number of months to develop and to learn competences. The EYE programme does this through the lens of fostering skills necessary to run a business in Europe. Concretely, young entrepreneurs meet more experienced entrepreneurs in another country to stay and work with for a period between one and six months. Up to this point, about 19’000 entrepreneurs have participated in the programme. Young people interested in participating can get in touch with their local contact points (these can be chambers of commerce or start-up centres for example). These contact points then provide support for the application and establish the contact with an entrepreneur in the other country. The contact points are coordinated by the Support Office on the EU level. The 27 EU Member States as well as Albania, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Iceland, Turkey, UK, Ukraine, and Kosovo are participating countries. Further, the programme is temporarily open for exchanges to Canada, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and certain states in the USA (‘EYE Global project’). Switzerland is not a participating country, however, Swiss entrepreneurs who are based in one of the above mentioned countries can join the programme.
In addition to the two above mentioned entrepreneurship education schemes, the Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) also have a strong mission to foster entrepreneurial competences and skills in the vocational education and training (VET) sector. This type of partnership is funded under the Erasmus+ programme and aims to bring together European consortia of VET providers, businesses and vocational colleges to develop ‘skills ecosystems’ (see SwissCore article). These CoVEs are vehicles – very similar to the European Universities initiative (see SwissCore article) – to modernise the education sector (in this case VET) through deep long-term collaboration across Europe between institutions that are sitting at the intersection of education and innovation. Therefore, the CoVEs’ role includes supporting entrepreneurial education by for example setting up incubators and strengthening entrepreneurial aspects of VET. Despite the fact that Switzerland is not associated to the Erasmus+ programme, Swiss institutions active in the VET sector can participate as full partners in CoVEs and in that capacity can receive funds from Erasmus+. Swiss institutions that want to participate as associated partners in CoVEs can apply for funding from the Swiss Programme for Erasmus+. The deadline for applications is 7 September 2022. More information for interested parties is available on the website of the Swiss national agency for exchange and mobility Movetia. In order to showcase how VET schools promote entrepreneurial thinking and skills, Movetia is organising an Entrepreneurship Summit on 2 June 2022 in Switzerland (registration is possible until 25 March 2022).