SMARTUP is the result of a smart cooperation effort between higher education institutes, companies, the EU Crowdfunding Network and business foundations from nine EU countries and Stanford University. The aim is to develop an innovative Startup Master & Advanced Reflective Tools through cooperation between Universities and companies belonging to innovative sectors, based on the idea that students need entrepreneurial competences to succeed: both hard about management and innovation, and soft and transversal skills, including those for self-awareness and resilience. SMARTUP offers wide-ranging support to face the challenges inherent in the entrepreneurial process, by providing a smart way to become a startupper in work and life. The project will build offline and online tools to support students in the early stages of enterprise development, from crafting their idea to accessing finance. A smart open space will be provided where would-be entrepreneurs can share knowledge and know how - but also tricks and tips – to face the challenge of creating a successful start-up; the community will be animated by students, startuppers, teachers, mentors, entrepreneurs, and investors. A key component of this supporting path will be a Master programme – developed and tested by participating universities in close cooperation with the other partners - linked to online instruments and contents, including serious games, coaching apps, and mentoring and mindfulness tools. SMARTUP will therefore integrate the different contributions of participating academic institutions and business organizations by means of new methodological approaches, in order to produce two main outputs: an innovative Master on entrepreneurship and an inclusive web portal for students and startuppers willing to improve their entrepreneurial knowledge and mindset.

The ALCARIA + Project is for Alcaria school, the opportunity to provide the students from this educational institution a complement to their studies through practical training in a European company, for 3 months, with the aim of improving their chances of employment.The School is located in La Puebla del Río a municipality in the province of Seville with a population of 12,190 inhabitants. The municipality is located close to the Doñana National Park. La Puebla del Río offers its residents a wide range of gastronomic, cultural and artistic offerings in a unique natural environment. Finally, we mention that the city is a land of great pastures and crops, especially emphasising the cultivation of rice and breeding of horses, cows and bulls.However, La Puebla del Río has an alarming unemployment rate of 47.78%. For this reason itis necessary to apply measures to control and stop this situation. In this sense, the school aims to contribute, as far as possible, to the recovery of the town providing better training for the young people.With these international mobilities, it was intended to supplement the training that these young people have acquired during their studies, and offer them the opportunity to improve a second language and acquire international experience. With this, the most immediate results will increase the employability of participants, facilitating their employment, while the European objectives are addressed in this regard.ALCARIA + was created for recent graduate students from IES Alcaria, completing a Technical Certificate Cycle in the Administrative Management sector. The training placements lasted three months and took place in three diferent periods (January-April 2016 / September-December 2016 / January-April 2017). The host country was Italy. The school estimated that international training not as part of the FCT (Training in the workplace) but as an improvement training for students interested. The reason for this decision wass based on the fact that capitalisation of international training would be greater having previously done internships in local companies.ALCARIA + aims to contribute to increasing employability and competitiveness of students in addition to pursuing the following results:- Providing a quality academic education and training.- Accelerate the transition from education to the labour market for young people.- Encouraging linguistic competencewith the aim of achieving bilingualism.- Facilitating the acquisition of professional experience at international levels.- Increase knowledge and innovative entrepreneurship in the participants.- Promote the practice and improvement of a second language and obtain technical vocabulary of the professional sector of the participant.- Foster synergies between education and labour and, more specifically, between the school and business, fostering understanding between the needs of one and the real demands of another.- Develop skills and knowledge to improve their skills and abilities in any work, project or situation.- Implement the concept of European citizenship and awareness of the importance of international mobility to create young people who are free and respectful of other cultures or societies.- Encourage family-based involvement, favouring the Coexistence Centre Plan.The expected impact of this project is related to:- Improve the vocational and language training of the participants.- Incorporation of the work system in another European country.- Strengthen the relationship between the centreand businesses in the area.- Flow of the economy.The expected long-term benefits are:- The school will establish relations with people from other countries to launch other projects and expand its relations with other countries’ entities.- The mobility of teachers will be encouraged.- Improving the quality of profiles among local youth.- New approaches to work by the school and local companies that have applied the knowledge brought by the young.- Extension of labour borders.

"DECISO - DEVELOPERS OF CIRCULAR SOLUTIONS” aims to support the delivery of services to induce investments projects for developing circular economy at local and regional scale in the following regions: Hamburg. Northwest Germany, West Macedonia, Alentejo. This is in line with implementing the European Green Deal and the EU circular economy action plan. DECISO will accompany the actions aiming to provide assistance for promoters in the development of financial schemes/programs for projects on Circular Economy, based on the concept of Circular Economy Ecosystem (CEE), which implies mobilizing local stakeholders and, when necessary, citizens, and scaling up the results from the local, to the national and European levels. The CEE approach will make it possible to deal with economic, organizational and cultural change through systemic solutions that involve all the players in the value chain of an asset and all those who can influence, even indirectly, its value. This approach also allows reducing risks for investors, because ecosystems with all their key factors, including geographic location, cultural factors and institutional support, actively help an innovation become successful. Since the paradigm of the Circular Economy Ecosystems can be declined in different ways, based on the objective of the initiative, the local context, the type of actors and the sector, the DECISO approach will be implemented in different local contexts and topics in order to produce guidelines that can facilitate the replicability of the initiatives put in place considering all the technical, economic, legislative, and social factors that can determine the success or failure of the initiatives.

CUENCA PLUS II, which aimed to provide citizens of our city, Cuenca, the impulse to strengthen and develop the economic fabric and business competitiveness of the municipality, was presented through quality training among urban youth to enable them to gain future employment.There have been several reasons that led the City Council of Cuenca to promote this initiative which encourages the development of the city through training their young people. On the one hand, this project was given continuity to the mobility projects that have been developed over the years from this institution. Thanks to these previous projects, a positive development has been seen in the profile of young people of the city who may now aspire to a wider range of possibilities in the labour market or to establish the foundations for future personal and professional projects.Also, as explained in the previous project (CUENCA PLUS), with this proposal the City Council intended to continue its efforts to alleviate the growth rate of emigration that is experienced in the town since the crisis began, due to the worrying situation of unemployment in the city. From the data handled by the institution itself, the City Council considers quality training of young people as the key to combating the deficiency of foundation in the education system, school drop out and lack of expertise of young people. Additionally we must add the lack of employment policies and existing widespread discontent in the town.The City Council proposed new collaboration at 3 local institutions that participated last year for the creation of a Consortium that allowed them to continue the work that began in 2014. The Consortium has formed by the City Council of Cuenca, Pedro Mercedes School, San José School and the CEOE-CEPYME Cuenca to collaborate in the development of CUENCA PLUS II project. It is important ot remark th eincluion of a new sending partner, IES Alfonso VIII, which started collaborationg with the City Hall in the management of the second flow. This project was aimed at 15 young Vocational Education Trainees who were following their final year of the VET course. Some of them did their intership as part of the FCT and some others lived this mobility experience as recent graduates. The training placements were for 3 months and took place in two flows (July 2016 and March 2017). The countries that hosted participants were United Kingdom, Italy and Portugal.Participants in UK and Italy recieved language training through the online course that Erasmus + Program made available. Meanwhile young people who conducted their practices in Portugal attended a Portuguese course in Spain before departure. Participants, also, received a socio-professional and cultural training organised by the team of the Consortium before departing to their hosting countries. The results provided for this project have been: - Consolidation of practical training that strengthened the knowledge acquired by young people.- Promotion of the improvement of the teaching-learning relationship and academic training.- Professional specialisation.- Promotion of language proficiency with the aim of achieving bilingualism.- Promotion of the autonomy and responsibility of young people.- Understanding on how an EU company operates promoting the entrepreneurial spirit.- Promotion of intercultural education as a basis for quality European training.- Improvement of social skills of young people.- Promotion of mutual understanding of academic training in the different EU countries.- Development of values such as solidarity, tolerance and respect amongst young people.- Promotion of recognition of their studies.- Promotion of the multiplier effect of mobility experiences.- Encouragement of the economic development of the city through better preparation of their young people.The impact associated with this project is: - Increased competitiveness at local, regional, national, European and / or international levels; - The flow of the economy, knowledge and ideas; - Increased collaboration and cooperation between institutions and businesses at international level; - A social and cultural impact which will create more tolerant citizens.The expected long-term benefits are: - Improving the quality of candidates for jobs; - Expanding frontiers in the search for work; - Generation of new skills.

The project addresses such problems in the economies and higher education systems of Belarus and Ukraine as marginalized private sector and insufficiency of today approaches in teaching engineering and entrepreneurial culture shaping.The project Goal was to develop an environment that stimulates engineering creativity, entrepreneurial activities and fosters youth employability via university-business-industry networking on FABLAB platforms. Five university fabrication laboratories with innovative equipment have been created in universities of Belarus and Ukraine for implementation of students’ engineering projects. These serve as university-enterprise “meeting points”, opening networking opportunities in both directions. Five training packages including eLearning materials have been developed in English and Russian using the competence-based approach and in accordance with the requirements of the Bologna process. These combine creative engineering and business aspects for building up hard and soft skills of students, trainees, LLL and are based on modern pedagogical approaches. Engineering curricula of respective specialties has been modernized in accordance with the training materials developed.The project created a strong impact on various levels: on the institutional level the fablabs and a data base of e-Learning materials are free to use by students and all the university staff in their daily educational process. On the local, regional and in the wider society these have been included into the fablabs activities via a sustained information campaign involving local printed and electronic media. On the national level development of the network infrastructure for youth innovation entrepreneurship support was facilitated by twinning academia/industry and academia/business through encouragement from national public bodies. At international level a contact network for exchanging good practices, experience sharing and future project implementation has been developed.