For Entrepreneurial Mindsets Link

The goal of the project is to develop and test a new problem based entrepreneurship teaching methodologi and a digital platform (ForEMLink) with the purpose of (1) establishing a transeuropean platform for educational development, innovation and peer to peer learning amongst students and teachers (2) facilitating ”real life projects” where students as part of their formal education co-operates with enterprises and organisations around solving problems and/or practical innovation (3) merging problem based learning and entrepreneurship teaching and hence taking both to the next level, and (4) preparing students for a worklife that physically and/or digitally transgress borders.
The project partners regard Higher Education as a potential key actor in producing solutions to current major societal and cultural problems of which the majority are transnational. Most present challenges are complex or so-called wicked problems: youth unemployment, social and economical inequality, global heating to mention a few. These types of problems call for strategies that gather stakeholders in processes where solutions are co-created among stakeholders. In this context HE can play an active part in two ways. Teachers can prepare the students for taking part in co-creation processes AND teachers can establish educational settings for students to create and co-create solutions while still being students. This project aims at both aspects. They are – from our perspective - closely connected. Solving what you could call “real life problems” has a high potential in building “real life capacity” in students i.e. capacity to transfer educational background and skills into professional work after ended education. This takes us to the core of ForEM: Developing a methodology and a digital platform that facilitates real life projects in HE across curricula, across borders, across faculties and across sectors. Both the methodology and the digital platform will be based on co-creation and will aim at capacity building within the area of solving complex problems – that is, producing solutions to small or large scale challenges the European community is currently facing. Be they cultural, social, commercial or political. ForEMLink – the digital platform - will be an open access platform with three entrances; one for organisations and enterprises, one for students and one for teachers. The platform has three levels or functions. One function is connecting organisations, enterprises and students. Another function is establishing transnational learning- and innovation hubs of students and a third function is establishing a knowledge-sharing forum for teachers. Organisations and enterprises will provide problems and challenges, the students will form hubs where solutions will be created and given back to the enterprises and organisations. The teachers will co-design new problem-based entrepreneurship teaching methodologies. The methodologies include problem based learning (PBL) principles such as problem finding, collaboration, student direction and peer feedback, innovation- and entrepreneurship teaching.
The project is an alliance of five partners; University College of North Denmark (UCN), Aalborg University, Denmark (AAU), Erasmus University, Netherlands, Universita Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain, and University of Tartu, Estonia. Each partner organisation contributes with specialised knowledge within areas necessary to the development of methodologies and platform