Empowering Europe’s young innovators with the social entrepreneurial mindsets, tools and skills they need to thrive along their entrepreneurial learning journey

Our main objective was to design, develop and test on large scale a novel Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education Programme for children and educators based on the effective combination and child-friendly application of the pedagogical principles of digital making education, of open innovation methods and of using leveraging technology for generating and scaling sustainable innovations in social business and traditional enterprises. Our target groups were young learners (6 to 10 years), older pupils (11 to 16 years), their educators and trainers as well as entrepreneurs who shared their experiences with these audiences (mentoring).

The DOIT toolboxes were designed for experiencing being a social innovator in mobile and fixed children-friendly maker spaces and are still easily accessible at the interactive DOIT Web platform. Co-created with help of the Children’s Advisory Committee DOIT novel resources cover inspirational experimentation, design, prototyping and basic business modelling know-how needed for sustainable product and service innovation. The DOIT platform  provides an integrated platform and learning pathway, which fosters first experiences with entrepreneurial thinking, social innovation, and intergenerational and multidisciplinary work - the foundation for Europe’s future entrepreneurs. DOIT tested, demonstrated and validated this learning and personal development programme on a large scale within 10 diverse European countries (AT, BE, DE, DK, ES, FI, HR, NL, RS und SI) in cooperation with regional innovation labs, schools and business networks, addressing different topics.

The full rollout of DOIT inlcuded Lego Foundation (Partner 9), the Open Innovation Network (Erasmus Programme; Partner 2) and associated partners (e.g. ENIS-European Network of Innovative Schools, ENIS) and aimed to attract attention of more than 150.000 professional innovation and teacher trainers. For teacher training institutions we offered the online DOIT facilitator training as a Massive Open Online course (MOOC) with the aim to involve and reach 20.000 initial and professional teachers with dissemination activities (e.g. final celebratory conference and showcases). Our rollout phase, through already 80 committed education and teacher trainer institutions (LOI) was ambitious, but with robust proof-of-concept in this project, we intended to intensively cooperate with numerous trans-European education and networks to communicate the success of the programme and ensure that early entrepreneurship education becomes standard practice across Europe as a basis for higher youth employment.

Team:

• Magª. Dr. Elisabeth Unterfrauner (project leader)
• Dr. Margit Hofer
• Sebastian Mair
• Dr. Christian Voigt
• Dr. Claudia Magdalena Fabian

Section: Technology and Knowledge

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Tags: education, maker movement, makers, social entrepreneurship, social innovation, youth