A couple of weeks ago I was in Mikkeli, Finland, to talk about how to build entrepreneurial ecosystems through action-based education. It was the yearly conference for the SPACE-EU network, a quite large network of educators in international business and language. They have recently begun to explore the area of entrepreneurial education, and have a working group that is investigating this on behalf of their members, read more here. At first, I thought that they must have mistakenly asked a PhD student to be a keynote speaker. But when I got there, it was obvious that they knew very well what we are doing at Chalmers and they were very interested in hearing more about it. So I talked about the entrepreneurial gap between academic life and the outside world, about venture creation programs as an entity that can bridge the gap, and about opportunities to generalize beyond venture creation programs within the area of entrepreneurial learning and teaching. It was very well received indeed, to my slight surprise! Actually this network has as one of its mission statements to “facilitating the bridging of the gap between higher education institutions and the business community and key stakeholders. “. So after having read that, I am not so surprised anymore. Very nice to meet new friends in this endeavour!
Excellent and very informative – more, please….