Arqus holds a face-2-face workshop on entrepreneurship at Leipzig University

From 3rd to 5th May, Leipzig University hosted the Arqus Collaborative Summer School on the Action Line 5 “Entrepreneurial University and Regional Engagement”. The Arqus AL5 Collaborative Summer School was held on various entrepreneurship topics relevant to all incubators that were presented and discussed. It took place at the SMILE/SEPT Competence Center at Leipzig University.

Representatives of most of the Arqus universities (Leipzig, Granada, Bergen, Lyon, Vilnius and Padua) participated in this School to present and exchange the knowledge, experiences and tools that are being successfully applied at their respective universities. The ultimate goal of this workshop was to facilitate the transferability of best practices among the Alliance members and to encourage greater coordination and integration in the area of entrepreneurship and regional engagement.

During the first session on “Design Thinking: How to integrate into the academic approach”, Vanesa Barrales Molina of Granada presented her approach to teaching design thinking and how it can be used to improve university services through student participation and feedback.

Christian Hauke of Leipzig shared a triangle of messages and pyramid of topics toolbox that can be used to help start-ups define the internal and external strategic communication.

In the afternoon, a focus was made on financing with a presentation by Lyon’s Camille Joly fostering innovation in entrepreneurship programmes with Erasmus+: the internACTional model. This was followed by a discussion led by Leipzig on “Access to financing for our startups” in order to compare notes on the services and help to get financing provided to our startups in our incubators.

On day 2, after a visit to the Bio City Leipzig and a city tour by SMILE colleague Johannes Goeckeritz, the afternoon was spent discussing the TTOs model with an insight into Bergen’s national study by Susan Johnsen and Dag Hellesund and a discussion on incubation models at our universities with all participants led by Lyon.

The Summer School started on day 3 with presentations by Erika Vaiginiene of Vilnius on “Team formation” based on personalities and Anna de Biasi on Padua’s “Contamination Lab programme” for promoting ideas and challenges, and ended with a discussion on entrepreneurship in the next Arqus cycle.

Over the 2 and half days, the 11 participants got to have rich discussions, share best practices and not just learn from each other but also about each other!

News prepared by Smita Mohanty (AL5 member at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3).