Venture Alliances, created in Envision Alliances project led by Turku School of Economics, has been bridging knowledge and experience between academia and industry for three years by bringing academics and businesses together to collaborate and build meaningful partnerships. As the project is nearing its end, more than 200 academics and businesses have registered on the Venture Alliances platform designed for finding collaboration partners. More than hundred potential collaboration pairs have been matched, and 23 collaboration partnerships Europe-wide have participated in the Entrepreneurship Residency Programme (ERP) developed in the project. In addition, the Entrepreneurial Competence MOOC Course for undergraduates will be available for higher education institutions to foster an entrepreneurial mindset and competences among students.
The Envision Alliances project was born out of the need to get novel academic knowledge developed at European higher education institutions to be more widely utilized to address the wicked problems related to social and environmental sustainability. The core of the project was to bring researchers with new research insights to collaborate with industry that has experience and contacts valuable in commercializing new products and services, to develop innovative solutions of great value to societies.
The goal of the project was to boost collaboration by matching researchers and businesses Europe-wide. The project answered this challenge by building a Venture Alliances platform to enable academics and businesses to find potential collaboration partners, and today, this platform has more than 200 users. The project exceeded its goal, as it was able to host more than 100 matchmaking meetings with potential collaboration pairs. The pairs willing to continue collaboration were offered additional support in the Entrepreneurship Residency Programme (ERP), which provided help with designing the roadmap for collaboration, as well as consultancy in matters important for each collaboration partnership, such as legal counselling, information on funding opportunities. Insights about the experience of participating in the ERP, as well as facilitating the collaboration, were gathered to enable learning and developing the ERP methodology over the course of the project.
Venture Alliance has developed the Entrepreneurial Competence MOOC Course for enhancing entrepreneurial mindset and competences among higher education students
As the project is approaching its end, the sustainability of the outcomes is emphasized. The project is currently looking for higher education institutions that would be interested in adopting the Entrepreneurial Competence MOOC Course developed in the project in their teaching. The MOOC highlights the essential role of collaboration in entrepreneurship, covering collaboration in opportunity recognition, risk and uncertainty, sustainability, multiple value creation, innovation, IP, digitalization, and digital platforms. Each module consists of instructional videos, exercises, and reading materials, and they can be used independently or combined according to the users’ needs.
“We have already been able to attract several universities’ interest across Europe, but we are more than happy to welcome new partners to our network to utilize the resources developed in the project!” says Marikka Heikkilä, the leader of the project consortium.
Turku School of Economics executes the Envision Alliances project in collaboration with Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands), Saxion University of Applied Sciences (the Netherlands), University of Maribor (Slovenia), University of Murcia (Spain), Acceler8 (Malta), Arcinno Ltd (Finland), Web2Learn (Greece) and AcrossLimits Ltd (Malta).
The project has received funding from the European Union's Erasmus+ Programme.
Further information:
https://venturealliances.eu/
Erasmus+ Programme, grant agreement 101055584
