StartUp Academy Multiplier Event in Romania
On November 29 Youth Association from Transylvania hosted the second Multiplier Event of the StartUp Academy Strategic partnership. This is a two-year project form which one year has already passed; it funded by the Erasmus+ Programme and is implemented by a transnational consortium formed by five organisations representing five different EU countries (Hungary, Greece, Romania, Croatia and Spain). The main goal of the project is to develop and mainstream an accelerator programme for young adults with innovative business ideas in rural areas.
With the implementation of the StartUp Academy project, we aim to equip young adults with entrepreneurial ideas, to improve young adults’ employability opportunities through providing them with an innovative training curricula, to create awareness among policy makers and authorities on the importance of promoting entrepreneurship education, to act as intermediary organisations creating a bridge among startups and business innovators, and last but not least to foster environment-friendly and sustainable business management practices among future entrepreneurs.
In order to reach these objectives we already made a large-scale surveying in Croatia, Greece, Spain, Romania and Hungary to get a clear and complete vision on the extent of innovation potential Croatian, Greek, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian young adults – with a special focus on those residing in less favoured geographical areas and we developed an innovative entrepreneurial training course which will be implemented and continuously optimised.
In the next phases of the project we will establish an online community of young European entrepreneurs, where stakeholders can interact, exchange ideas or good practices, and propose new business initiatives. Then, we will provide support and business coaching services to young entrepreneurs.
To mark the finishing of the training courses our Ngo organized a Multiplier Event where we focused on presenting the final conclusions of the survey and the training modules for phase 1. The schedule and the activities were the following
15:30-16:00 Registration – Participants arrived and one of our volunteers helped them to register themselves on the attendance sheet.
16:00-16:10 Official Opening – we welcomed the participants explaining what will happen and why the event is organized
16:10-16:40 Introduction to the StartUp project – we presented what the project is about using a PowerPoint presentation, focusing on all the steps of the project, but mainly focusing on the training phase 1.
16:40-17:30 StartUp Pitches – After this introduction we asked the participants to group themselves into groups of 3-4 and to think of entrepreneurial ideas they would like to implement. Instructions were given on what to focus on. The groups received 30 minutes to do this and were guided and helped by the facilitators. 7 groups were made and then in 20 minutes each group had 3 minutes to present the pitch of the ideas. These presentations were judged by the Hungarian Delegation of the project and by the founding members of our NGO. Grades were given from 1 to 5, 5 being the best, for the following aspects: Pitch Presentation, Implementability, Relevance, Sustainability and Innovativity. GOLDEN ROAD, an infrastructure development company won.
17:30-18:00 Short break with lunch where the participants talked about their pitches and ate cold dishes.
18:00-19:00 Survey presentation – Here we made a presentation of the conclusions made by the large scale surveying with special attention paid to Romania. Some questions were asked by the participants to which the hosts answered
19:00-19:40 Brainstorming in a World Café Style – the facilitator explained that World Café works in the way that 5 groups are made, each are given a question on Flipchart, and then each group had 5 minutes to identifying new approaches on tackling the key issues shown by the survey. After 5 minutes the groups moved rotating to the next topic and when all was done the original groups presented their conclusions in 5-5 minutes.
19:40-20:00 Drawing Conclusions, presenting next steps – In this session a brief review was presented of what occurred, participants were informed on when they would be able to apply to be part of the training and for ending they filled the event evaluations.
More than 30 stakeholders took part in this very successful multiplying event, representing young people from educational institutions, teachers, journalists and other media representatives, town hall staff and members of other civil society institutions. Through the enthusiasm of the guests we gather new energies to continue with the second half of the project.
