The social, economic and environmental challenges that local and regional communities face, call for new integrated approaches to cultural, economic and ecological innovation. Within the educational sector, this challenge needs to be addressed and at the same time connected to laboratories/mentors from actual innovative communities and entreprises. What competences, skills and mentorship do young cultural innovators need to create new sustainable social and ecological entreprises? And how can mentors from different educational contexts, working with this question, cooperate and learn from each other? Building on the results from the international curriculum project on ’Ecopreneurship’ (Leoardo project 2012-15), the project aims at sharing practices from ongoing courses in social and ecological entrepreneurship across educational contexts. Through a series of five seminars, each partner will afford the other partners their particular perspective on the competence-, skills and mentorship question. Through this process, each partner may translate new insights and perspectives back into potentials for innovation within the context of their own course desing and mentoring practices. From this step by step process the project will destill and disseminate their key findings related to mentorship in ecopreneurship, across educational contexts. The objective of the project is threefold: (1) to share practice, perspectives and methods across educational courses and contexts (2) to develop collaboration within the existing course contexts involving exchange of own students and staff (3) to co-write and publish one scientific article based on these key findings. Also bilateral institutional collaboration connected to course collaboration and exchange of staff and students will be opened up for through the 2 year process. The project aim is to develop applied mentoring methodologies that promote initiative and entreprenurship, self empowerment and self esteem, also at the grass root level. Bringing this particular focus in one of the seminars, will help the vertical integration of higher education, vocational traning and laboratories of communities and entreprises of practice we aim to achieve. All participating institutions have a main aim of improving their own courses, skills and mentoring competences, share and develop new insights. We need to share and dialogue to understand the pathway from Ego to Eco. Exchange of students and staff will be a central part of the project. For each of the participating institutions, this will promote internationtionalisation and increased capacity to operate at EU/ internasjonal level. The project will result in widening circles of impatcs from empowered communities and entreprises in participating laboratories of practice to students and teachers in partcipating vocational and higher educational courses in ecopreneurship. The lessongs learned will be dissiminated and made available to the wider public through a written and published scientific article.
The social, economic and environmental challenges that local and regional communities face, call for new integrated approaches to cultural, economic and ecological innovation. Within the educational sector, this challenge needs to be addressed and at the same time connected to laboratories/mentors from actual innovative communities and entreprises. What competences, skills and mentorship do young cultural innovators need to create new sustainable social and ecological entreprises? And how can mentors from different educational contexts, working with this question, cooperate and learn from each other? In order to answer this question, new collaborative practices connected to social and ecological entrepreneurship need to learn from each other, and develop explorative, interconnected laboratories of practice. Through joint seminars and student and staff exchange, the project was linking these laboratories of practice where key actors in vocational training, higher education and adult education can connect. The term Ecopreneurship has been coined (Barane et.al. 2015) to describe this laboratory approach to integrated social, economic and ecological entrepreneurship. The objective of the project was to bring toghether key actors in educational ecopreneurhip from different geographical and instiutional contexts, share and explore ways of working in a fourfold way: (1) to share practice, perspectives and methods across educational courses and contexts (2) to develop collaboration within the existing course contexts involving exchange of own students and staff (3) explore methods to design and deliver a series of seminars/workshops in each geographical location (4) to co-write and publish one peer-reviewed article based on these key findings. Connected to these four objectives, the results of the project were destilled in three areas of inquiry: A. Ecopreneurship as Methods of Applied Ecologocal Economics: The visits to a series of eco-business across the participating countries and sites, gave a good foundation for the conversations on practice, perspectives and methods of business development that connect social, environmental and economic value creation. These case-studies along with two applied ecological economics work-shops in Aurland, gave a solid foundation for 2 articles published on the theme, one applied in Norwegian for practitioners and one theoretical peer reviewed article in English. The publications are both available to the wider public, and were published in the context of the project. B. Ecopreneurship as Methods of Education for Sustainable Development: The visits and case-studies connected to each hosting institution across the participting countries, gave a solid ground for developing common key questions, sharing methods and curriculum desing in Ecopreneurship as an educational tool. In the first seminar of the project key challenges were identified; and used as a basis for the design of the subsequent three seminars.These challenges were (1) The social ecopreneur challenges of economic and ecological entreprise, Copenhagen (2) The role of the students in developing innovative educational programmes, Stockholm (3) The role of craft in imagining the future of community, Aurland. The results from the educational perspectives of the project was destilled in an article in Norwegian, by Jorunn Barane, project coordinator.This publication is printed and made available also online. https://sjh.no/2019/10/16/prosjektrapport-om-okologisk-entreprenorskap/ C. Ecopreneurship as Methods of Creating Space for Dialogue: The methodological basis for all strategic partnership meetings and all semianars was dialgoue, and the testing out of different methods of dialogue for different purposes. The reason for creating spaces for dialogue, is to create values in encounter, connecting peoble and place. An article aimed at practitioners and local communities on the essence and experiences of the different forms of dialogical space, was written in the Norwegian report (se above link) . Eco means building on nature and the eco-system in the concrete geographical location, place-based. Entrepreneuship means mapping and finding the resources at place, and the stories and cultutral potential. Ecopreneurship means to develop tools and methods to re-imagine and create the future through nature and culture at place.