Cities and regions across Europe are confronted with skills shortages and mismatches that hamper economic progress and social development. One of the key issues for HEIs (and member states) is to stimulate the development of entrepreneurial, creative and innovation skills and activities in all disciplines, and promote innovation in HE through more interactive learning environments and strengthened knowledge-transfer infrastructure . Entrepreneurship is a transversal competence, which can be applied to all spheres of life, from personal development, to actively participating in society, and to starting up ventures. The acquisition of competencies to act upon opportunities and ideas, and transform them into value for others by mobilizing resources is of central importance to doctoral candidates. From the specific perspective of researcher careers, the transition after a PhD to a non-academic sector is not always an easy endeavor for researchers. Although awareness is increasing, and a rising amount of training in transferable skills for Doctoral Candidates (DC) and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) is organized, this type of training is regularly provided in parallel to the doctoral programme, rather than being fully integrated. As a consequence, the importance of transferable skills training is seen as secondary, as opposed to training related to specific research skills. Furthermore, policymakers and society would like to see a cultural shift in Academia towards Open Science practices in order to account for the spending of public money on scientific research and to allow a broader part of society to participate in benefiting from innovation and knowledge created. Academics are becoming more and more aware of the topic, behaviour change is hard however. As reward systems are not yet fully adapted, and not all academics have had equal opportunity to see the gains of open science, the culture shift has not yet taken place and fully embraced these practices.
Therefore, in line with enabling institutional culture change, ECRs should be introduced to new ways of conducting research in order to be prepared for the future and to help create a more sustainable and fair way of disseminating research.
The project will tackle the following challenges: 1. Skills shortages and the need for researchers swiftly entering the non-academic labour market, and the need for entrepreneurial and innovation skills; 2) The need to integrate skills training into PhD programmes, the need to value the transferability of skills and transferable skills training, and to alleviate the workloads of ECRs.; 3) The need for a culture change towards OS practices.
