at the women entrepreneurs project website. Women entrepreneurs is a 4-year research, innovation and staff exchange programme in the Horizon 2020 framework of the European Union.
Within the framework of this project we have developed our training programme to support female entrepreneurs in their early stage.
One major research focus in Educational and Psychological Research and in Entrepreneurial and Leadership Studies in the past decade has been on obtaining a better understanding of how to help entrepreneurs develop in order to achieve a level of high performance and entrepreneurial success. Our motivation is to advance the possibilities of young women to become successful and fulfilled entrepreneurs.
What do we want to achieve?
We want to increase the number of female entrepreneurs and their performance potential by innovating the entrepreneurship education through combining competence, identity and edutainment approaches in order to contribute to social and economic development.
| Start: | 01. Feb 2018 |
| Duration: | 4 months |
| Workload: | approx. 3 hrs/week |
| Location: | online (with 3 face-to-face meetings in Dublin or Jena) |
The training programme started in the beginning of February. Information about the activities in the future will be published on this website.
Early stage micro and small business women entrepreneurs from the service sector in Germany and Ireland.
The women entrepreneurs’ education and training programme has been developed to enhance the capacities of early stage women entrepreneurs and increase the success of their overall entrepreneurial performance.
The programme provides learners with multiple learning paths customized to their organizational needs and individual competencies. The course, which has been created in a blended learning model, consists of three face-to-face kick meetings in each country and three online units. The content refers to individual learning goals:
Introduction: Assessing entrepreneurial competences and choose courses.
Courses: We provide five courses -How to successfully overcome challenges to effective business performance.
Networking & Reflection:Parallel to these online courses there will be a networking and reflection unit
This module is ideal to start the programme. You will examine your company regarding its strenghts and weaknesses and create a business model.
This course comprises two methods that could help companies increase requests for their services.
This course comprises two methods that could help companies manage technological changes.
This course comprises two methods that could help companies manage an increase in customer complaints.
This course comprises two methods that could help companies to deal with increased competition.
For our training programme we have produced the web based series “women entrepreneurs | Biographies” with female entrepreneurs talking talking about their experiences. Next to statements about different entrepreneurial topics, the biographies are implemented in the training programme. Watch now Chapter II of our little series.
To realize our goals, the project will undergo three main phases. First we are going to set up a survey to indicate different capacity gaps for our target group of early stage women entrepreneurs. Then we will design the education and training programme, that enables early stage women entrepreneurs to develop entrepreneurial competences and that increases their entrepreneurial success. This programme will be evaluated in the last phase. These three phases are strongly related to our different work packages.
To support women entrepreneurship there is a need for increasing the number of women entrepreneurs and for raising the performance and growth potential. Training and education play an important role in this regard. Relatively little research has been conducted to assess the impact of entrepreneurial education and training programmes on performance and growth potential. Training programmes today mainly address entrepreneurial behaviours. However, an understanding of the fundamental capacities is critical in the face of the varying challenges and contexts confronting young women entrepreneurs.
It is the aim of this project to get a better understanding of the fundamental entrepreneurial capacities of early stage women entrepreneurs and to develop an educational and training programme that enables early stage women entrepreneurs in Germany and Ireland to develop the fundamental capacities to facilitate their entrepreneurial success. We believe we can significantly contribute to the EU Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan, with the proposed activities strengthening the sharing of knowledge in Europe.
The EU Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan recognises entrepreneurship and self-employment as key for achieving economic growth and for job creation. However, the TEA rates for females in the business-driven economies of Europe are, with 5% of the adult population, much lower than, for example, in the developing regions of Asia (13%) or in the United States (10%). The Total early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity Rate (TEA) is a key indicator of the level of new enterprise creation. Germany and Ireland, for example, belong to those countries in the innovation-driven economies of Europe with relatively low TEA Rates (Germany: 4%; Ireland 4%). The under-representation of early stage women entrepreneurs in the business-driven economies of Europe is a complex phenomenon that can be explained by various factors such as socio-cultural, economic and educational factors.
