objectives
Overall objectives of the project are:
1) Raising awereness and interest towards entrepreneurship among university students and help them to build internationally competitive teams around their knowledge based business ideas. Based on earlier experiences of students’ business ideas, those are most often different types of ICT based solutions.
2) Attract new entrepreneurial talent into the Central Baltic region to strengthen region as a technology intensive startup ecosystem
3) Create new cross-border model for supporting creation of student-based knowledge intensive international companies by common cross-border accelerator program for university students in three countries.
4) To create 10-15 student-based knowledge intensive cross-border companies and 5-6 cooperation agreements.
actions
1) The first step is to inspire students about entrepreneurship by organizing different types of events and courses together in all three universities. Those will be e.g. MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) of entrepreneurship, hackathons and business idea development workshops.
2) Secondly, the project collects a cross-border Baltic community of mentors, teachers and business-minded youth together for the very first time, and develop their business ideas to success stories.
3) In the project we also offer to the most advanced cross-border student companies a possibility to find financing opportunities. As well as new markets or partners by participating in existing investor and startup events outside the Baltic Region and organizing own events in the region.
4) Documenting the project in multi-platform environment and collecting the best practices of respective countries, development agencies and universities it will be easy to implement the model in other regions and countries too.
results
10-15 student-based knowledge intensive cross-border companies and 5-6 cooperation agreements. This result is what is measured under the relevant programme result indicator, ie. number of knowledge intensive cross-border companies. Established companies have also prepared export and expansion plans for the next few years.
An interactive educational MOOC (massive online open course) on idea generation and entrepreneurship which continues to attract entrepreneurial talent into the Central Baltic Region also after the project and which promotes Central Baltic as a technology intensive startup ecosystem in the world.
Cross-media based international startup competition which attracts investors to the Central Baltic region and facilitates cross-border networking of other enablers of the startup ecosystem in the region.
