ENTRUST Newsletter
WestBIC is an Enterprise Ireland partner providing hands-on startup support, funding readiness and investment preparation for early-stage founders in the west of Ireland.
ENTRUST is a training & development programme where people aged 50+ will be supported in bringing an idea for a sustainable tourism business from concept to commercialisation.
“younger people are more likely to transition from opportunity identification to forming entrepreneurial intentions, older people are more likely to transition from forming entrepreneurial intentions to actually engaging in entrepreneurial activity, making older people equally likely to become entrepreneurs as younger people.” [1]
Over the last year we have been working on researching our target group, as well as starting to develop a curriculum aimed at older people wishing to start a company with a tourism, heritage or sustainability focus. The draft version of the curriculum is now ready and is under review from partners.
We started working on the review during our partner meeting, in the beginning of February. The Finnish partner, Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences (Haaga-Helia), hosted the other partners in Helsinki: WESTBIC (Ireland, WestBIC), AidLearn (Portugal, AidLearn) BIOSPHERE (Portugal, BIOSPHERE) and Business development Friesland (the Netherlands, BDF). Thank you, Haaga-Helia, for having us!
Not only did we review the curriculum so far, we also discussed the development of our platform and the documentaries the partnership has made. To show examples of good practice, each partner has interviewed two people of the target age, who have a company in a rural area in the tourism sector.
In the upcoming months we are going to develop the curriculum even more, and we will create a platform, which can be used by senior entrepreneurs and others. This way they can use the platform to learn about entrepreneurship and related topics they find useful, picking and choosing from them.
We are looking forward to putting the current materials to the test, with those who actually work with the target group and those going to use the materials.
Do you want to know more about the project, or would you like to be involved in the project? Please let us know!
[1] M.M. Gielnik et al.
Age in the entrepreneurial process: the role of future time perspective and prior entrepreneurial experience
J. Appl. Psychol.
(2018)
ENTRUST Newsletter was originally published in WestBIC on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.