Preventing EU Youth Unemployment - One Gig at a Time

Project Information

WorkPilots expansion

Grant agreement ID: 877557

DOI

10.3030/877557

Project closed

EC signature date 18 July 2019

Start date 1 August 2019

End date 31 December 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

WORK PILOTS OY
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WorkPilots expansion (Preventing EU Youth Unemployment - One Gig at a Time)

Reporting period: 2019-08-01 to 2019-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

WorkPilots is creating solutions for two big challenges: a) to help preventing youth unemployment and b) create new solutions for future of the work.

Due to the high unemployment figures the combined EU budget level cost for combating youth unemployment has risen to approximately EUR 1 billion per year. We are providing new models to enable low threshold opportunities early enough to worklife.

Future of work is being disrupted and on-demand staffing is growing fast. In the EU area there are already 8.9 million “iPros” or independent workers. New ways to do work are increasing and organisations are not well prepared to handle this future of various worker groups and needs and they need new solutions. This shift from traditional core workforce towards extended workforce can take place with our various platform models and boost diversity and inclusivity.

Our vision is the world where everyone has equal opportunities to get work experience, to integrate into society and feel social inclusion. Concrete work experiences can make a huge impact to persons needing help. It can also improve the attitudes and understanding of cultural differences and improve hugely access to worklife. At the same time we can help organisations having easy access and new channels to this extended workforce and helping them to get motivated workers. By enabling short-term gigs to those who want to have access to worklife, we can also boost local economy and even fight the grey economy in Europe.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Our feasibility study had two main targets:

a) to verify market feasibility and evaluate models and benefits to each stakeholder together with market strategy.
b) To verify product-market fit and what kind of technical issues we should tackle to be able to roll-out into various EU markets and do more detailed Go-to-market planning

We had several internal and external (customers and partners) meetings and discussions, evaluations and coaching sessions to define further our international expansion strategy, identifying various opportunities, criterias, constraints and priorities.

Our target customer segments are the same as before but we established both a new business model and a new sales strategy to enable scaling of our business more rapidly and make it much easier to tackle the entry barriers in different countries and thus hugely speed up our internationalization and positive impact we can create. We will also target our services to other worker groups needing help in a similar way we have helped young people, e.g. such as disabled people and immigrants.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

With our new business model, we estimate we can much better focus some service offering vertically across Europe (e.g. NGO’s working with specific target groups) rather than earlier planned country based scaling. In this way we will be able to reach much faster wider audience and create huge positive impact and prevent unemployment among our target groups. Our new model will also enable more attractive B2B Saas models which will be important financial corner to our business and also improving next steps after first work experiences has been achieved.

Extended Inclusive Workforce