The Commission calls upon European initiatives to carry out considerable experimentation in the field of fostering innovation interest, engagement and capacity among students in early schooling – and to encourage schools to create such learning experience that helps build up new generations of young European innovators.Students need authentic, practical experiences and realistic learning environments as essential parts of active learning. Teachers need to have access to a varied new range of resources in order to build activities for students that are as true to life as possible, bringing the outside world into the school. (Commission, Entrepreneurship Education, 2011)The Commission’s invitation should be seen against the background of changing Europe from traditional industry to innovation economy in the widest sense of this term.To play a competitive role in the globalized economy, Europe is increasingly depending on a population of innovators and entrepreneurs, in particular dependent on new generations of young people with innovation interest, skills and capacity.The Commission calls for such experimentation across all educational sectors, and with a special focus on early education and supported by relevant European funding mechanisms, including in particular Erasmus+ and Horizon.This is in the iYouth context called the Empowering European’s Young Innovators Agenda.The iYouth project forms part of this Agenda through its contributions to the exploration of how to, in practice, foster innovation interest, engagement and capacity in secondary school.The project will create and openly share guidelines, documentation and knowledge produced through the project’s intensive experimentation requiring substantial co-driving and co-creation of the involved five student teams from different European countries.The project will produce its results through taking the student teams (mixed aged and gendered teams of 12 - 15 years old secondary students) through four progressive 6-month phases of innovation engagement, progressing from an opening trying out phase to more complex innovation engagement phases:Go Innovate! 1 – LOCAL (Community driven)Go Innovate! 2 – SHARING (Youth-driven)Go Innovate! 3 – COLLABORATIVE (Community-driven+)Go Innovate! MAX – CO-CREATIVE (Project-driven)The innovation engagement will address local societal challenges and include considerable open schooling collaboration with cross-sector community resources.Each of the Go Innovate! Phases will build on the project’s innovation engagement methodology platform, taking the student teams through the full circle of innovation engagement from simple curiosity to co-creation capacity.The project’s Innovation Engagement Circle consists of five progressive steps:- Innovation Curiosity- Innovation Interest- Innovation Engagement- Innovation Skills- Innovation Capacity[The project’s Innovation methodology is detailed and illustrated in the Attachment Pack]All project activities will work through real-life and real-time local societal challenges in collaboration with small eco-systems of community resources (the open schooling approach). All project processes will involve the student teams as co-drivers and co-creators of activities and results.The post-project sustainability of those local eco-systems is a major priority in the project.The participating student teams from each secondary school will be supported each by 2 dedicated teachers, and the accumulated experience and knowledge on how to foster innovation engagement in early schooling will be shared with the entire teaching community. The project is expected to deliver significant contributions to the Empowering European’s Young Innovators Agenda through its authentic and intensive experimentation, the documentation of this experimentation and the creation of valuable and useful outcomes for secondary schools across Europe as well as for European policy and research communities dedicated to develop innovation engagement in early schooling.The key outcomes of the project will be:The iYouth Resource CentreThe iYouth Practical Guidance CollectionThe iYouth 30-minute VideoThe iYouth Policy PaperThe iYouth special: Research Recommendations for the Empowering European’s Young Innovators AgendaThe project consortium includes 3 knowledge partners with considerable didactic and virtual capacities, 5 practice partners (secondary schools) from 5 different countries and a quality and exploitation partner with 15 years in European collaboration.All practice partners are dedicated to engage fully in the project’s experimentation, and the engagement across the curriculum is formally endorsed by the school managements and by the public authorities to which the school refers.[The endorsements are documented in the iYouth Attachment Pack]Among its activities the 5-day iYouth Encounter holds a special position and brings together the participating student teams