On the 11th and 12th of February the partners gathered in London for the kick-off meeting of this very innovative and ambitious project.
EDUCCKATE stands for EDUcation Cultural & Creative Knowledge Alliance for Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs and will implement an innovative, mentored internship scheme to boost the innovation potential of high education institutions and companies, foster an entrepreneurial mind-set in students and promote entrepreneurship.
The cultural and creative (CC) sectors make places attractive to live, invest in and visit; they are key to sustainable economic growth. Recent reductions in public funding have led to job losses and loss of expertise in small and medium sized CC organisations (SMEs). In an insecure economic environment, large graduate employment schemes are over-subscribed and SMEs report an application shortage.
A new generation of entrepreneurs is needed to increase the long term sustainability of the CC sectors and increase flexibility for future economic changes. The project provides students in CC majors with: access to business, including CC SMEs, opportunities to develop business projects and new professional paths. It benefits high education institutes through links with CC business and business by partnership with specialist high education departments in order to develop new sector specific services/products/prototypes with commercialisation potential that benefit from state of the art academic research/knowledge.
11 partners from 7 different countries got together to discuss the next steps and set important milestones. The coordinator, the University College London Centre for Applied Archaeology, also organised a meeting with two Phd students in the CC sector to learn from their experience.
Then, LEVEL 5 will play a key role in validating mentees and mentors’ competences in training/mentored internships. Here, Tim Scholze from BUPNET is explaining to the partnership how this innovative system works.
It was a great start and we hope to continue like this in the future!
EP
pictures from London from Stock.xchng
