Periodic Reporting for period 2 - women entrepreneurs (Transforming European Women’s Entrepreneurship: The Education and Training for Success Programme)
Période du rapport: 2017-03-01 au 2019-02-28
The under-representation of early stage women entrepreneurs in the business-driven economies of Europe is a complex phenomenon that is determined by various factors, including socio-cultural, economic, and educational ones. Training and education play a very important role in the development of Women Entrepreneurs, and the necessary tools must be improved.
The purpose of this project is to set up and strengthen international and inter-sector collaboration in the research field of entrepreneurial competence development. We want to increase the ratio of successful female entrepreneurs across Europe and their performance potential by using an evidence-based programme approach to make innovations in entrepreneurship education. The women entrepreneurs’ education and training programme is based on a study of more than 300 women entrepreneurs from Germany and Ireland. The programme has been developed to enhance the capacities of early stage women entrepreneurs of micro- and small enterprises from the service sectors in Germany and Ireland and increase the success of their overall entrepreneurial performance.
Overall Project Objectives
1. to identify and assess the fundamental supporting competences of early stage women entrepreneurs in Germany and Ireland for successful entrepreneurship;
2. to design and implement an educational and training programme that enables early stage women entrepreneurs to develop fundamental entrepreneurial competences and that increases the entrepreneurial success;
3. to evaluate the effectiveness and the impact of the educational and training programme.
For WP3 we have designed an educational and training programme for early stage women entrepreneurs to develop their fundamental entrepreneurial competencies. The findings of the survey implemented in WP2 have been used to create a blended learning programme. The Education and Training Programme is based on Problem-Based Learning and a Learning-by-Doing Strategy, combined with elements of self-reflective, narrative and collaborative learning as well as edutainment. By selecting this didactic strategy, the focus is placed on the learner and individual entrepreneurial problems to be solved through collaborative learning, self-reflection and narration processes. The programme was validated and finalized in2017 and implemented and evaluated in 2018 according to the tasks in WP4.
Within WP4 a model for the evaluation of the training and learning programme for early stage women entrepreneurs was developed based on the framework of Kirkpatrick. It included data collection before, during and after the implementation of the learning programme, by using questionnaires, data tracking and problem-centred interviews. WP5 was an ongoing process that was continuously followed up upon throughout the lifetime of the project, as it concerned, dissemination, exploitation and outreach activities.
The socio-economic influence of the project should reach far beyond that of a mere learning programme.The project enabled a network of female entrepreneurs in Germany and Ireland, which has not existed in that way before. Consequently, in the long-run Europe and the South American countries can profit from the project not only scientifically, but also from an economic perspective.
The project’s transcontinental collaboration has helped to gather new perspectives and find new approaches to support female entrepreneurship. Finally, promoting the entrepreneurial identity of women entrepreneurs will inspire women to become entrepreneurs, which should further gender equality as a contribution to building a more just society. The wide application of effective implementations will help policy-makers in their efforts to deal with socio-economic challenges, such as to create jobs and promote economic growth.