Promoting entrepreneurship

Small-scale Ljubljna
Mariano Cecowski of XLab shows us around Ljubljana

How to promote entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship in employees and graduates?

Challenges:

  • How to promote graduate workplace skills
  • How to promote knowledge transfer between business and higher education?
  • Could a course in entrepreneurship getting students and companies working together on business plans help?
  • And what is the best way of developing this?

In the FLITE project we have been using the rapid development process of ConCurrent Design (CCD) to design just such an online course aimed at those in the IT industry or studying IT at HE level. Started in October 2013 we have now got to the stage where we have a design document that the course materials team can now use to prepare the course. Participants on the course will learn more about

  • their own skills and capacities through working with Business Model You
  • how to use the rapid development collaboration process of ConCurrent Design
  • issues to determine in a business plan through the use of the Business Model Canvas

The design document has the following sections:

Objectives

  • Keywords / definitions:

Target groups
Knowledge model

  • Overall Learning Outcomes (LOs)
  • Specific topics and Learning Outcomes

Pedagogical model

  • Relationship between the topics and the learning activities
  • Motivational Model
  • Assessments

Technical Delivery Model
Course administration and external opportunities model

  • Marketing
  • Student registration (Systems, routines, responsible HEI, etc.)
  • Ownership to the business ideas. (Disclosure, IPR, …)
  • Course administration for small scale pilot
  • Course administration for large scale open pilot

But there are still a great many challenges remaining. The themes which emerged during our meeting with partner XLab in Slovenia last week include the following:

  • How can we teach and promote self-directed learning?
  • How will we facilitate the formation of the international teams (especially in a large-scale pilot)?
  • How detailed do the business plans need to be?
  • Are business plans even the most appropriate end product?
  • How will we resolve IP issues? Perhaps teams will work on their second best idea rather than their best idea?
  • Could a storytelling framework help to bring the disparate parts of the course together?

We know that there is a great deal of work to be done prior to the first small-scale pilot which will start in October. Our discussions in Ljubljana were greatly helped by the input from our volunteer Quality Board members who were able to give us the perspective of a more dispassionate observer.

So if you want to add your voice to the Quality Board or be a pilot learner then do get in touch.

Find out more about the course in the presentation below.