CONTEXT Small and medium enterprises have undisputed significance in driving Europe’s economic growth, accounting for 85% of new jobs and 66% of private sector employment. As such, the quality and relevance of the vocational entrepreneurship education provided for new and existing entrepreneurs plays a key role in achieving the 2020 goals of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Business failure is increasingly recognised as an important topic within enterprise education and for good reason: more than half of European businesses will not survive past the 5-year mark. Yet, failure is accepted by many as a normal feature of the macroeconomic and the focus has been put strongly on helping entrepreneurs learn from failure, with a view to starting over from scratch. While important, this approach overlooks the huge economic, societal and personal consequences of business failure: entrepreneurs pay a high cost in lost investment and income, and in self-esteem and career trajectory, not to mention the knock-on effects of unemployment for others. Although current SME business failure rates are almost back to pre-recession levels, our knowledge of macroeconomic cycles instructs us to use this time to prepare for the next recession. In addition, Brexit presents one of the most significant challenges to small businesses not only in the UK but to main trading partners within the EU: Germany, Netherlands, Ireland and Spain. For these reasons, it is more important than ever to provide emerging and established businesses with the skills needed to weather the turbulence. OBJECTIVE Our goal is clear: provide early stage entrepreneurs and established SME owner-managers with the knowledge and skills needed to identify and interpret early warning signals of business crisis, and to take timely, corrective actions, thereby facilitating growth, or survival, in unpredictable or adverse situations. ACTIVITIES & RESULTS EASI will develop an EARLY STAGE INTERVENTION FRAMEWORK. Developed in collaboration with our HE partner, this comprehensive but accessible digital document will share up-to-date knowledge on Early Warning Signals of business crisis, will present detection and intervention opportunities, and make a clear case for their beneficial application to SME leadership and overall business resilience. Produce an EASI CURRICULUM + OERs. Including a curriculum, learning objectives, lesson plans, assessment guides, and access to a variety of original teaching content in digital format, these free resources provide business advisors with a complete toolkit for teaching early stage intervention skills to entrepreneurs as part of their business development programmes, either in classroom or in blended (digital) learning formats. Create the EASI ONLINE COURSE. Based on the OERs, this training course will be optimized for computers, tablets and smartphones. It will reinforce classroom teaching and enable SME owner managers and entrepreneurs to develop and test their early stage identification and intervention skills. PARTICIPANTS Our main Participants are early stage entrepreneurs and established SME owner-managers providing them with the knowledge and skills needed to identify and interpret early warning signals of business crisis, and to take timely, corrective actions, thereby facilitating growth, or survival, in unpredictable or adverse situations. We will also work directly with a second target group: business advisors working in providers of vocational entrepreneurship education: enterprise support organizations, Chambers of Commerce, incubators, colleges etc. A third key target group is policy makers who can mainstream provision and our partner organizations, as our mission effectiveness is directly related to the topic. IMPACT The overall impact will be an increase in the number of advisors incorporating early stage warning signals of business crisis and intervention strategies to mitigate risk into their training programmes and becoming more digitally competent in using digital technologies. By improving the skills and attitudes of business advisors we will impact not only the effectiveness of entrepreneurship training to individual trainees and groups, but be able to create waves of change regarding entrepreneurship teaching in VET as a whole.
The main objective of the project was to equip early stage entrepreneurs and established SME owner-managers with the knowledge and skills needed to identify and interpret early warning signals of business crisis so that they can take timely, corrective actions. The Working Group on Entrepreneurship Education Report (EC,2014) highlighted that quality post-school entrepreneurship education depends on improving teachers ability to make ‘entrepreneurial learning' relevant to the real-world and to use more innovative teaching methods. The Smart-up project objectives will do both. Specific objectives are 1) introduce the topic of early warning signals of business failure based on up to date academic research which will be both informative and instructive to business advisers, lecturers, enterprise educators, which will build their knowledge and pedagogic capacities on the topic. 2) To enable trainers, business advisors, lecturers, enterprise educators to access a new teaching model which they can use to introduce the topic of early stage intervention for business failure/crisis into their course provision. 3)to provide a interactive online learning course which enables direct access to educational resources for SME owner/ managers.
It is recognised that small and medium enterprises are key to driving Europe’s economic growth. SME’s account for 85% of new jobs and 66% of private sector employment. As such it is widely accepted that vocational entrepreneurship education plays a key role in achieving smart, sustainable and inclusive growth for new and existing entrepreneurs. Business failure is accepted by many as a normal feature of the macroeconomics and the focus is put strongly on helping entrepreneurs learn from failure with a view to starting over from scratch. While important this approach overlooks the huge economic , societal and personal consequences of business failure. With the resources developed by the Smart-up project, business advisors and educators will be able to incorporate early stage warning signals of business crisis and intervention strategies to mitigate risk into their training programmes. Early stage entrepreneurs and established SME owner-managers will then be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to identify and interpret early warning signals so that they can take timely, corrective actions, thereby facilitating growth or survival in unpredictable or adverse situations.