Pan-European entrepreneurial summer academies with impact: The case of STARTIFY7

© 2017 by Emerald Publishing Limited.Entrepreneurship is viewed as essential to the future prosperity of Europe and creating societies that are socially and economically inclusive. The information communication technology (ICT) sector has been identified as an area of great entrepreneurial potential for Europe and yet the continent struggles to create global leaders in the digital startup space. In response to this challenge, the European Commission launched its Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan to stimulate and support young people to become entrepreneurs and exploit the potential of ICT, in terms developing new digital products and services. This chapter reports on a project to develop and deliver a series of pan-European summer academies for entrepreneurship training funded by Horizon 2020. The chapter details the process of developing the academies and offer reflections on the impacts of the project

Enterprise 2.0: the “new knowledge management” or just another buzzword?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of Enterprise 2.0 inside a complex business process, seen through the relationship between dynamic capabilities and key knowledge activities. In particular, we investigate the effect of a Wiki in a product management process in a small UK-based software development company. The study draws upon existing theoretical foundations, such as the linkage between key knowledge management activities and dynamic capabilities, as well as characteristics of enterprise social software. The research was performed using a case study qualitative approach. Overall, the Wiki was observed to play an active role in key knowledge activities, with a clear emphasis on those led by the software development team. The boundaries of the Wiki’s use were restricted to the roles of technical-oriented individuals, failing to affect activities perform by sales and product management units

A Sociotechnical Approach to Knowledge Management in the Era of Enterprise 2.0: the Case of OrganiK.

The increasing need of small knowledge-intensive companies for loosely-coupled collaboration and ad-hoc knowledge sharing has led to a strong requirement for an alternative approach to developing knowledge management systems. This paper proposes a framework for managing organisational knowledge that builds on a socio-technical perspective and considers people as well as technology as two highly interconnected components. We introduce a conceptualised system architecture that merges enterprise social software characteristics from the realm of Enterprise 2.0, and information processing techniques from the domain of Semantic Web technologies. In order to deliver a KM approach that could assist in reducing the socio-technical gap, we suggest deploying such a solution using an integrated sociotechnical implementation methodology

Organisational Knowledge Management Systems in the Era of Enterprise 2.0: The case of OrganiK.

The increasing need of small knowledge-intensive companies for loosely-coupled collaboration and ad-hoc knowledge sharing has led to a strong requirement for an alternative approach to developing knowledge management systems. This paper proposes a framework for managing organisational knowledge that builds on a socio-technical perspective that considers people and technology as two highly interconnected components. We introduce a knowledge management system architecture that merges enterprise social software characteristics from the realm of Enterprise 2.0, and information processing techniques from the domain of Semantic Web technologies, in order to deliver a KM approach that could assist in reducing the socio-technical gap

When pedagogic worlds collide: Reflections on a pan-European entrepreneurship education project

Through the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan launched in 2013, the European Commission set out its agenda for how entrepreneurship could help tackle the problems associated with the 2008 financial crisis. In this chapter we present how STARTIFY7, a project funded by the Commission’s Horizon 2020 initiative, sought to respond to the Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan. The STARTIFY7 project was created as a thematically focused and lean-training summer academy system with the aim of creating pan-European teams of young entrepreneurs in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. The project and its underlying pedagogic approach, derived from Neck and Greene’s (2011) work on ‘worlds’ of entrepreneurship education, is discussed along with the outcomes achieved