Development of HEI–company partnerships in the framework of EnterMode

The EnterMode project aims to stimulate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills of higher education teaching staff and company staff and develop the entrepreneurial mind-set and skills of higher education students. One of the project objectives is to develop HEIs–companies partnerships for the promotion of entrepreneurial education of higher education students, in the course of their internship periods. In the context of the project, HEIs–companies partnerships will be created with the primary objective of facilitating the organisation of internships for students and the application of the EnterMode Internship Model in the long term.

The EnterMode project consortium has so far contacted and selected companies interested in hosting interns. The partners have approached enterprises and created their own network of enterprises at national and European level. Each partner recruited companies for the benefit of the whole partnership, so that the enterprises will be able to collaborate with more than one University.  Unfortunately, due to Covid19 outbreak, the following phase, consisting in matching students with companies and finalising the internship arrangements, had to be postponed. The consortium expects to be able to contact companies again in autumn 2020 to resume cooperation. A Memorandum of Understanding will then be signed between each HEIs and collaborating company. In the framework of the project lifetime, the EnterMode university partners will create a minimum of 8 HEI–company partnerships to carry out the pilot experimentations of the EnterMode Internship Model. This will include both national and international types of partnerships, with companies in the same country and in other countries. In the second case, different provisions will be made, to care for the specific characteristics of transnational mobilities.

At present, the creation of the online network of HEIs–companies is going on, as a way to guarantee the effective sustainability of the EnterMode outputs and results. The community is hosted in the DISCUSS platform https://www.discuss-community.eu/.

The creation of the HEIs–companies partnerships is an important step before the start of the project pilot experimentation phase, nevertheless it is also a measure for ensuring the sustainability of the project results in the long run. Therefore, apart from the specific partnerships that will be created during the process, the methodology to form a partnership and the model of the Memorandum of Understanding are considered important results that will be exploited further by the Universities to enlarge their networks of collaborative enterprises.