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International enterprises looking beyond borders ..
International enterprises looking beyond borders : Young Entrepreneurs at Work
Start date: Sep 1, 2015,
End date: Aug 31, 2018
PROJECT
FINISHED
It is recognised that entrepreneurship is a major driver of innovation, competitiveness and growth. Europe needs a more entrepreneurial culture. However, learning how to run a business is only one aspect of it. Entrepreneurship should be understood in its broader meaning. Entrepreneurial skills and attitudes provide benefits to society even beyond their application to business activity. They are also a vehicle for personal development. In fact, learning about entrepreneurship will include developing personal
qualities such as creativity, taking initiative, responsibility, which will prove generally useful in life.
General Objectives:
By improving basic cross-curricular skills , broadening the potential of ICT and effective communicative use of English, we want to promote a work based learning and highlight that entrepreneurship is the key to fight the gap between formal, informal and non formal learning, looking for closer connections between school and work.
Context/Background:
Starting point is the idea to identify and fulfil the customers' needs, coping with new marketing trends, following the demand for niche items, organic local produce, quality guaranteed products, experience based purchases.
An added value is represented by KA1 on staff mobility, already running between Italian and Dutch schools, having the "Development of entrepreneurship in young students" as the shared goal. The teachers involved are already in touch with the learning environments of respective schools and can have already focused on the needs of students with reference to the specific economic and social surroundings.
Description of activities/Participants:
Talented marketing choices? Let's put them to the trial.
Students (males and females equally represented) will do it with the startup of the Mini Enterprises. They will learn about the procedures for establishing businesses, study how to develop a business plan, look for funding and finally they will organize the Market Days
Studying online marketing strategies, building entrepreneurial virtual scenarios will be just the first part of a process resulting in the actual organization of real International Markets, creating customized packets, getting in touch with the "real" customers from abroad. Inclusion will be granted for disadvantaged students, either of socio-economic origin or of minority ethnicity, or really from disabled categories.
Methodology:
A work based learning being the starting point, all the ICT tools, from learning platforms, to social networks, to interactive websites will be exploited.The role of teachers in our project is that of facilitators. They will not impose their ideas on students, but rather give them support and advice.The teacher is therefore a tutor who intervenes only to a minimum degree in the decision-making process
of the group. This type of methodology is about learning through direct experience: pupils are likely to make mistakes, and to see the consequences of their mistakes.
Results/Impact:
On students and teachers
The main goal so is to empower the business initiative of secondary school students in general and girls in particular, with ICT skills and entrepreneurial values to help them to be able to create future opportunities for innovation and quality ICT related employments
We hope to achieve a stronger motivation and therefore increase the success and decrease the early school abandonment of our students, especially of the socially at risk and of the disadvantaged ones.Induce attainment and raise ambitions in young people, make them realize what tools will be essential in their working life will be the goal of teachers and staff on a more general level. Sharing good practices with a special focus on entrepreneurial attitudes bent and integrated with more structured teaching activities will be what the teachers will enhance and trial all along the project development.
On local and online communities:
We will elaborate a multi-dimensional dissemination approach with different communication tools adapted to the different target groups in order to attract interest and necessary feedback/involvement from them. We will involve our PR- departments to make sure that the dissemination activities are well implemented and developed towards the different target groups.
We will research on the impact that participation to this project will have on students’ life development. This would include not only skills acquired, but also career choices, college courses taken and number of business start-ups created by the students . We are convinced that more evidence of the impact of these programmes would help to get entrepreneurship education on to the agenda of policy makers and educational authorities.