Wow, what a fantastic group of people that came from all over the world to Gothenburg to discuss venture creation programs at our forum focusing on the entrepreneurial learning that occurs at these unique programs! As someone said, “I have never before been in an international conference where we so quickly came down to discussing core issues, without getting stuck at definitional discussions”. It was evident that the people managing and championing these programs had very much in common, despite being quite a heterogenous group in many ways – region-wise, size of institutions, backgrounds, theory vs practice orientation etc etc. Someone asked if we just had invited our friends, because of the family-like atmosphere that quickly developed, but actually quite few of the participants had met before at all. Or as one of the American program managers said to one of the others from US: “How come we haven’t heard of you before?!”.
One of the results of this milestone conference is that we now are determined to keep this global community going by creating a network entity facilitating further collaboration and exchange. We at Chalmers will try to lead this development, but it is now evident that it will be a truly collective endeavour since everybody has so much to gain from collaborating in this unique group of people / programs. We will all try to meet again in one year, either at one of the participating institutions or in connection with EURAM in Istanbul in June 2013, where Chalmers will be hosting a track on Entrepreneurial Behaviour.
Here is a list of participating institutions: