Presentation of OpEn @ Helexpo, Thessaloniki, September 2017

Our project “Open Up Entrepreneurship“ has been selected as a “success story” by a panel of experts from the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture of the European Commission. “Success stories” are finalised projects that have distinguished themselves by their impact, contribution to policy-making, innovative results and/or creative approach and can be a source of inspiration for others.

Our project has developed the open online course entitled “OpEn: A Learning Walk in Digital Entrepreneurship“. OpEn is a 32-hour (8-week) multilingual (English, Greek, Italian and Spanish)  course, which aims to inspire and engage existing or future young entrepreneurs in digital entrepreneurship.

The selection of our project as a success story was made on the basis of rigorous criteria regarding its quality, relevance and results. The project has been marked as “success story” in the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform, a database where you can find descriptions and results of projects supported by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme.

The OpEn course was presented at the International Conference “Alliance for Entrepreneurship and Development in Western Greece”, organized by the Region of Western Greece on 13/12/2017.

The scope of my presentation entitled “Cultivating an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’: Insights from the OpEn online course” (in greek), co-authored with Dr. M. Komninou, was to present the OpEn course as a good example of the Triple Helix (university-industry-government) relationship.

OpEn is an open online course in digital entrepreneurship available at https://openup.upatras.gr/, funded by Erasmus+ within the project “Open-up Entrepreneurship”. Through this example, we wanted to highlight the challenges that educators face during the design and implementation of such a course and the way in which our collaboration with the “outside” (from the academic world) has helped us.

Finally, we discussed the “lessons” we have taken through the process of implementing OpEn and attempted to answer the question “Can we cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit, and if so, in what way?”

Cultivating an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’: Insights from the OpEn online course