In a global economy where there is a high uncertainty on employability and company sustainability, the endeavour to create a new enterprise requires the knowledge and application of the best practices and the mastery of the most advanced enterprise management methods. In this context, it becomes essential to develop entrepreneurs' abilities: a highly specialized and customised training plan is required to prepare the future entrepreneurs for the challenge to manage a business in its different dimensions. Higher Education, where some of the most advanced know-how in the scientific and technical fields exists, could be the ideal environment for nesting highly advanced technological and scientific entrepreneurship. However, this is not the reality and the existing initiatives to develop entrepreneurship in this context, except for some rare exemplary cases, have failed. Mainly due to a relatively low motivation amongst students, teachers and researchers but also due to social, cultural and legal barriers, lack of financial support and institutional recognition and also because most of these initiatives had an overimposing academic component and lacked effective linking to the enterprise world. In order to achieve an effective promotion of entrepreneurship it is thus necessary to link the Universities to the surrounding reality but above all to provide an effective training and mentoring strategy of the entrepreneur during the whole process of launching a company. Thus every entrepreneur must receive training and motivational counselling in the first phase and on enterprise aspects in the second phase, including the efficient use of Information and Communication Technology to be able to compete in the global e-business market. The main objective of the PREMIO (PRIZE) project is to leverage processes of development and individual promotion of entrepreneurs, since the initial phase of the motivation and idea, through the first steps of formation of the company until it has a sustainable existence. These entrepreneurs will be stakeholders from Higher Education, final-year students, professors and researchers that intend to transpose their research work to the market. This objective will be reached by the definition and implementation of a training/mentoring model that departs from personalized sequential workshops subordinated to subjects like Company, Business-plan Creation, Innovation, Financing, Marketing and Copyright, Internationalization and Localization that will support the business ideas of the trainees. Each trainee-entrepreneur will propose a business idea as a result of this stage. The best ideas will receive a prize (PREMIO) that corresponds to the incubation of the company in very favourable conditions of the project partners (Science & Technology Parks). They will also be helped by an individual accompaniment throughout its enterprise forming stage, processed through a collaborative platform with the help of an international pool of experts. This will ensure a very strong impact of the project results and will guarantee the replication of the model.
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