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| Our group in Innovation Academy |
YIE staff from Lapland UAS is further exploring good practices on
innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems and this time gained beneficial
experiences during benchmarking visits to Dublin. The trip took place on 17-21 March, 2014. The participants were the head of RDI of Business and
Culture Marika Saranne, Project manager Eila Seppänen, the leader of
InnoBarentsLab (IBL) and project coordinator at the Rovaniemi campus Anzelika
Krastina, senior lecturers Tuija Kuisma and Kaisa Lammi. Lessons learnt
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| Innovation Academy |
during
the visits will add greatly to further development of InnoBarentsLab and other
entrepreneurship support activities within the project.
InnoBarentsLab is considered to be the place
where students and aspiring entrepreneurs can work on different innovation
projects, developing business ideas, preparing for start-ups, but the main aim
is to develop entrepreneurial and innovative mind-sets. Therefore in this
benchmark trip we were focusing on similar activities in Dublin.
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Bridget Noone, Enterprise Executive introduces to
Trinity College Dublin Entrepreneurship programme |
Visiting
University College Dublin, Innovation Academy and Entrepreneurship Campus of Trinity College Dublin proved that creating
entrepreneurship ecosystem such as IBL and similar is the core for supporting
entrepreneurial endeavours. It was mentioned that Dublin is considered as a
“Silicon Valley of Europe”. Innovation is seen as integral part of
entrepreneurship and is nurtured and
encouraged by the numerous support mechanisms in both institutions. Entrepreneurship Campus of Trinity
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| Pitching |
College Dublin
provides post-graduate entrepreneurship education programmes. Additionally
whether needed it offers incubation or access to accelerator programs.
The campus has 16,000 sq.m. of lettable space for small and medium-sized enterprises
and provides them for free for half a year or more for the start-ups of their
students.
Innovation Academy of University College Dublin is an internationally recognised exemplar of best-practice in
innovation and entrepreneurship education. We were lucky to
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| The poster of the idea |
participate in the
educational workshops as well as during the pitching of the ideas in Innovation
Academy. It must be noted that the students of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
programme are coming from different study fields and in one group together
works a lawyer, architect, retired military person and a businessman. It was
said that the multidisciplinary teams is the core of innovation and during the
pitching it was very interesting to see that people can come up with most
unexpected solutions to given business
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Young entrepreneurs working in the premises
of the Entrepreneurship campus |
challenges, and this is exactly what
host companies are expecting.
During this trip we gained also new prospectives from
Dublin Chamber of Commerce, where we were informed about the practices of
implementation of Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs programme. The programme is aimed to support young entrepreneurs to develop their
skills in business management through an exchange in an enterprise run
by experienced entrepreneurs in another European country. The host Marion
Jammet expressed her believe in the importance of
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| With Irish students during the workshop |
such programme and to the
surprise of all confirmed that in their experience there are only success
stories, meaning that both – the host company and young entrepreneurs have only
benefited from such cooperation across the borders.
Common
conclusion of our group is that these visits are of great educational value and
extremely inspirational. One of the hosts encouraged us that we are on the
right track in terms of promotion of young entrepreneurship in the Barents and
that nothing happens overnight. Innovativeness is a way of thinking that we need
to spark into our region and therefore we need more projects such as YIE.
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| In the incubator of students' start-ups |
One of the
most significant outcomes is a mutual agreement to cooperate between University
College Dublin, Innovation Academy and Lapland UAS in the future. Creation of
entrepreneurial ecosystem wasa topic for potential future joint project. It is
also a good achievement from the sustainability point of view of YIE project
outcomes.
Some
thoughts and quotes as a reflection of the visits:
- “Space
matters!” It is important to have inspirational space for students where to
work at any time of the day.
- “Creative
thinking” + “Entrepreneurship thinking” + “Application to own context” – the
core triangle of entrepreneurship educational programmes.
- Our
job is not to advise, but to conceptualize.
- Entrepreneurship
mix of Innovation Academy: Large and SMEs, profit and non-profit – because the
world is not a single colour.
- Train
the trainers!
- Entrepreneurship
should not be an academic school, we make people to THINK. Our school is
constant debate!
- Early
stage ideation is important.
- Action
based and experience based learning.
- We
teach the opportunity recognition.
- Entrepreneurship
environmental factor matters. You have to have at least one strong supporter
from the top administration!
- There
is no shortcut – Trinity College Dublin works 26 years with Entrepreneurships
programme and still many things are to be developed.
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| At the University College Dublin campus |
