Social Entrepreneurship Student Companies in the Baltic Sea Region -project combines entrepreneurship education, multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural team work as well as social entrepreneurship. Our project's is about supporting young people in acquiring needed skills in the rapidly changing and global working life. Entrepreneurship is the tool for young people to make themselves more employable as well as active members of the society. Through entrepreneurship education and practical hands-on learning programmes, we believe that young people will develop the basic skills and key competences needed in the working life. In our project, students will set up their own Student Companies (SC) and that own company is the platform for their learning. Based on research, this kind of learning model increases the ownership and engagement of students. This project focuses mainly on combining entrepreneurial skills with socially and environmentally minded thinking pattern. For fostering partinership and cooperation instead of only competing with each other we will develop and implement peer assessment and feedback for students' ideas and performance. While young people create the student companies, teachers will work closely together in developing material to support young people's entrepreneurial learning. In the project teachers and JA Staff will develop a peer assessment methodology, create a material bank that will be available for all teachers teaching the Company Programme. We will also together create a concept for Entrepreneurship Diploma that can be then used a certificate in schools in the future. At the end of the project a Teachers Guide will be published for the future use of teachers inside the project countries but also all over Europe in the countries where Company Programme is used. This is a three-year project that will each year have 60 young people (secondary level students) and 15 teachers participating in entrepreneurship education and events related to that. Trade fairs will involve three times more young people who learn international selling. We believe that this project helps young people and teachers to create international networks that will definitely help them in the future working life. The skills that they will obtain are all life skills that can be used in any job and also outside in everyday life. As the result of this project Europe will have more open-minded young people who know how to work together with people from different cultures. They will have excellent cooperation skills and a practical experience about international entrepreneurship. Young people and teachers will develop their mindset in thinking about the social, cultural and social aspects of entrepreneurship.
We wanted to achieve during each of the three years about 15 international Student Companies (SC) based on the JA Company Program implementation. The Student Companies were to be formed by the students participating in the project in the first live meeting and last for a schoolyear. After forming the SCs, the students in each SC would then work together setting goals and means of conducting their business operations as well as making joined decisions also about time tables and other basic elements. They would meet and work together on their company during live events, and in between live events they would work on their joined company in their own countries according to what they had planned and agreed to do as well as having an active online connection with each SC member in the company to be able to communicate the progress and work further until the next live meeting. The main goal was to teach the young people to be international; learn to be tolerant and creative without boundaries, have the courage to use another language effectively, work together for a shared goal and while doing that, learning many new skills, such as negotiating and making compromises in an international group with various backgrounds and opinions.
Social Entrepreneurship Student Companies in the Baltic Sea Region -project combined entrepreneurship education, multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural teamwork and social entrepreneurship to support young people in the constantly changing global working life of the future. Researches show that through entrepreneurship education, young people can find their strengths, learn to take on responsibilities, become more active members of the society as well as make themselves more employable because they will have adopted entrepreneurial attitudes as well as learned basic skills and key competences needed in the working life. All this results in better future aspects and not only benefits the persons involved but also their entire communities. We applied for the project to ensure that the future generations would be better equipped to create a better life for themselves as well as for their communities through learning entrepreneurial attitudes and skills. Entrepreneurship education has been proved and recognized as an effective tool for that around the world. JA World, which all the partnering organizations of this project are members of, was a Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 2022, the third year of the GOALS project.