about
Entrepreneurial Preparation for Notable and Engaging Universities - Entrepreneur is a project to support European universities in becoming more entrepreneurial and innovative. By fostering competencies of the future, it will secure a new generation of student entrepreneurs and innovators. It will bring radical change by creating a student-centered, non-elitist, open, and inclusive university based on collaboration between higher education institutions, the public and private sectors, and citizens.The consortium will create a scalable model for the development of academic entrepreneurship. This approach will support the innovation and entrepreneurship potential of university students/graduates, staff members, and innovators from the consortium, utilizing the existing EIT ecosystems and having a long-term and positive impact, even beyond the end of this project. Work Package 2 is about professionalizing existing technology transfer offices. First, it is necessary to define the starting point and the key competencies that will allow the development of better technology and knowledge transfer office employees.
The Oxford English dictionary defines a process as a continuous and regular activity or sequence of activities undertaken in a specific way and leading to a certain result-objective. Managing processes in organizations allows the focus to be on what is essential to achieve the goals of inpiduals, organizational units, and, ultimately, the whole organization. Just as for business enterprises, the key processes are those that bring value to the customer. In Technology Transfer Organization (TTO) the key processes are those that translate into increased dissemination and use in the economic and social environment of research results and support entrepreneurship. This project focuses on the key processes for achieving TTO's objectives, treating them as a source of knowledge for building key competencies and, in turn, surveying the level of competence development of TTO employees. This activity will form the basis for developing a common objective to design solutions to help the science and higher education sector strengthen universities' research and entrepreneurial position by creating the conditions for entrepreneurial development.
In pursuit of the project's objective, the first stage analyzed the processes performed by the transfer offices to identify, one by one, those that most affect the fulfillment of their core mission and involve staff to the greatest extent. Subsequently, the activities, actions, and decisions made in the processes became the basis for analyzing and collecting data on the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes that allow employees to carry them out effectively. This gave input to the next step: developing key competencies for key roles in the most relevant processes.
The research team described the key processes, the objective and flow of the methods, the participants, and information on the knowledge skills and attitudes supporting the implementation of the individual tasks/activities. They provide input to the next step of the project - the development of a set of core competencies for the critical roles in these processes.