The need for acquiring entrepreneurial and digital competences is not limited to learners seeking careers as commercial entrepreneurs or as employees within the IT sector, but rather extends to “all walks of life” as EU policy makers have repeatedly emphasized [1,2,3,4]. Consequently, the importance of entrepreneurship education (EE) and digital education (DE) as integral part within university studies has been prioritised in recent years [4,5]. Despite those recognised needs on the policy side, attention given to EE and DE in higher education (HE) programmes still remains rather elusive [6,7]. In fact, the Covid 19 pandemic merciless shows that DE, in particular, requires a place at the nucleus of academia and cannot be dealt with as side issue at the dawn of the digital age [4]. Ultimately, existing shortcomings with regards to EE and DE within HE causes a sub-optimal exploitation of entrepreneurial potentials as well as a substandard deployment of digital technologies at later stage of careers (in academia or world of work outside HE). Our project “Ulysses Contest – Digital Student Competition on Family Business” (ULYSSES) has been designed to address these deficits. It focuses on university students that are keen to gather practical entrepreneurial learning experiences and want to enhance their digital skills. ULYSSES will provide this combined chance by setting up the 1st digital European student competition that focuses explicitly on family businesses (FB). To put this into practice, sustainable and regional university-industry interaction networks will be built that input well-prepared, complex, and real business challenges into the Ulysses Contest (IO1, IO2, IO4). The competition is based on an innovative virtual learning and teaching platform (IO3) that will be tailored to the functional needs of the contest, as well as to the individual user/target groups (students, educators, family business stakeholder) requirements. As such, ULYSSES will drive change for the benefit of a new form of digital entrepreneurship education within the involved partner institutions and beyond. Moreover, ULYSSES will: a) Propagate the exploitation of the European Frameworks on Digital Competences (DigComp) and Entrepreneurship Competence (EntreComp) inside HE b) Develop scalable online open-educational resources that focus on fostering digital and entrepreneurship competences c) Catalyse digital readiness and entrepreneurial competence deliverance of involved students and educators Despite demonstrating resilience, optimism and agility, most family businesses have been exposed to unseen health, safety, and welfare challenges by the COVID-19 pandemic by severe disruptions to their core operations. We believe Erasmus+ projects can have a limited impact for mitigating effects of Covid 19. The Ulysses Contest may help by: d) (Re-)vitalising and strengthening industry-university interactions, e) Finding practical solutions to pressing business problems, f) Raising awareness for challenges and skill requirements of FB among academia, g) Introducing FB to a talented pool of potential employees, h) Creating exchange among FB stakeholder on the basis of the Ulysses virtual platform (IO3). Methodologically, the project design of ULYSSES is based on a co-creational industry-university interaction as recommended by the EC (6). The project will be realised within a 2-year long, interdisciplinary collaboration (4 HEI, 2 SME,) and is expected to unfold impact across 4 EU Countries involving 120+ students, 40+ educators, 10+ FB stakeholders. PARTICIPANTS ● University of Szeged, Hungary – lead partner, experienced in entrepreneurship education ● Management Center Innsbruck, Austria – experienced partner in entrepreneurship education with well-established relationship in the region ● Libera Università di Bolzano, Italy – experienced partner with a dedicated centre for Family Business Management ● University of Vienna – experienced partner with a dedicated research group for Family Business internationalization and case study research methodology. ● Univations Gmbh, Germany – experienced partner with several lead roles in entrepreneurship education Erasmus+ KA2 projects ● Fundus Agentur, Austria – communication and networking agency [1] EC 2014: Entrepreneurship Education. A guide for Educators. [2] EC 2013: Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. [3] EC OECD 2015: Entrepreneurship in Education. [4] EC 2020: Digital Education Plan 2021-2027. [5] EC 2019: Education & Training Monitor. [6] EC 2018: The state of university-business cooperation in Europe.
In light of the above, the Ulysses project aimed to implement the specific challenges of family business and the entrepreneurial competencies that help to solve these in an innovative way in higher education. We wanted to achieve the following objectives: - To develop/strengthen cooperation with local family businesses from the Partner regions and to learn about the challenges they face. - To compile case studies based on the challenges identified above, which could be used to integrate these challenges into university education. - The case studies were designed to develop the entrepreneurial competencies defined in the EntreComp Framework. - Instead of solving the case studies individually per course, we organized an international case study-solving competition. In this way, we both raised the impact of the Ulysses project and contributed to the internationalization of partners and students. - Finally, we felt it was important that all our efforts could provide a basis for as many similar initiatives as possible, so we shared all the outputs generated on our website in a roadmap format, which aims to present all our activities and results step by step, thus providing a hands-on tool for all projects with a similar objective.
A central aim of the Ulysses project was to implement the specificities and challenges of family businesses in higher education. To understand the significance of this problem, it is first important to stress that family businesses are of crucial importance in almost all countries (both Eastern and Western), with more than half of all businesses in most economies being family businesses. And during the COVID-19 epidemic, one of their almost forgotten importance was once again highlighted: family businesses are much more resilient than the average business, survival is more important to them, and owners will even risk their personal wealth just to keep the business going. All these characteristics might lead one to think that they are also a major focus of higher education. Unfortunately, this is far from the case. In most European universities, even in business BA programmes, there are only very few courses with a family business focus - especially in Hungary, where the entrepreneurs of the 1990s are preparing for a generational change, and this type of knowledge is badly needed.