SPINTeams

Universities are the main source of innovation and solutions to challenges that can be marketable. Many start-ups and University spin-offs are founded at European Universities, but when it comes to sustainability and growth capacity after 3 years more than 50 % of startups fail. The main reasons are the lack of profitability and growth capacity.

The origin of this failure comes from the roots of the company founded: the entrepreneurial and business skills of the founders, the complementarity of skills of the founders and their teams, their ability to find support networks and effective, bottom-up start-ups support ecosystem and the capacity of going international and build international cooperation.

The project aims to improv the entrepreneurial and business skills of the would-be entrepreneurs at partner HEIs, as well as their current and future Spin-offs and Startups, to achieve more and more sustainable and growing businesses. The project will act with a bottom-up approach acting twofold: impacting the practitioners and the HEIs.

• A collection of training webinars for creating the role of “Entrepreneurship Coaches” at partners HEIs;
• A complete training course for improving entrepreneurial and business skills addressed to advanced students, PhD students, and researchers (would-be entrepreneurs or spin-off/start-up founders);
• A handbook “Building entrepreneurial support ecosystems for HEIs”;
• A guide “mentoring and peer learning methods for new entrepreneurs support”;
• International entrepreneurs’ cooperation platform to foster international cooperation, teamwork, networking, and mentoring.