AspiRing enTrepreneurIaI families to perpetuate cultural buSiness Across geNerations

Project summary

ARTISAN focuses on improving and extending the offer of high quality learning opportunities that are tailored to individual adult learners’ needs. This project focuses on family members in artisan and agro-tourism family businesses. The family-in-business, includes senior and/or junior members from the family that controls the business and plays a critical role to the survival, continuation, and growth of the family business. Artisan and agro-tourism businesses are firms that produce and/or sell a country’s cultural tradition and products that stem from the country’s tradition. More specifically, the project aims to develop training programmes, tools, and structures that can help to enhance the entrepreneurial skills and competences of this target group. Past studies show that entrepreneurship is an area that families in business attribute strategic importance to, and they control this practice as a means of controlling the strategy and direction of their business. As a result, our project comes to fill an apparent need of families-in-business to enhance their entrepreneurial potential and thus their abilities to control and manage more effectively their business and its direction. Thus, we are very niche in our focus, aiming to support the continuation and growth of artisan and agro-tourism businesses (and thus the continuation and enhancement of the cultural component that they carry) through the enhancement of the entrepreneurial skills and potential of family members nested in these enterprises. The choice of the partners was made after careful consideration to ensure that the project would bring together the best possible expertise and knowledge on the topic at hand and would allow the development of realistic and valuable programmes through relevant cross-national collaboration, knowledge inter-exchange, and complementarities amongst the group. The project partners include the following organisations: UCLan Cyprus, GrantXpert, Castilla La Mancha, University of Beira Interior, University of Palermo, EDHEC and ISOB. Prof. Panikkos Poutziouris from UCLan Cyprus will be the Project Coordinator of the project. A Project Management Team (PMT) will be responsible for the proper implementation of the project’s work. The cooperation and communication between project partners and other stakeholders will take place via a number of “spaces” (e.g. email exchange, Skype video-conferences, Project Management Online Tool, and physical meetings). The project aims to deliver nine key intellectual outputs: State of the art (led by UCLan Cyprus); Empirical Report and Analysis (ISOB); Methodological Plan (Castilla La Mancha); Entrepreneurial training courses and material (EDHED); Train-the-trainers Handbook and Guidebook (University of Palermo); Casebook (UCLan Cyprus); Entrepreneurial enhancement Web platform (UCLan Cyprus); Evaluation of ARTISAN Pilot testing (GrantXpert); Final version of Offline and Online Programme (EDHED). The methodology that will be used to deliver the intellectual outputs is broken down into a series of steps, involving the following key phases: Review of existing literature & programmes; Research amongst families-in-business; Analysis of primary data; Plan on entrepreneurial training provision; Design of entrepreneurial training plan; and E -Pilot testing and evaluation. The key activities that the project will organise in the context of the execution of the project, include: Project management, Secondary and Primary research and analysis, planning and programme design, translation and localisation of programmes, pilot testing and evaluation, Dissemination and Quality assurance. The project is expected to have a positive impact on a number of stakeholders, including the project partner team members and their organisations, target groups and their respective family businesses, and other organisations and groups, including associations in the artisan/agro-tourism sectors, central and peripheral government tourism/culture authorities. A number of quantitative and qualitative indicators are set to assess whether and towhat extent, the project reaches its objectives and results, including among others the numbers of participants and feedback in the context of primary research and pilot testing. The impact of the proposed project can be of higher value to the national and broader European economy, aspiring to inform policy on how to set the structures for the continuity and strengthening of family businesses in sectors that are critical to preservation and reinforcement of Europe’s cultural tradition. The main target of the project sustainability activities is to continue with a wider implementation of the programme, after its initial pilot testing. Thus, wider dissemination activities can ideally take place that will allow targeting and encouraging larger numbers to attend the offline and online entrepreneurial learning programmes.