Entrepreneurial management practices play a pivotal role in taking entrepreneurial knowledge and utilizing it towards innovation and talent development, ultimately creating growth and increasing the effectiveness of both new business venturing as well as small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). EM4FIT investigates entrepreneurship and related management practices from an interdisciplinary and multi-level angel as important variables in the interplay between individual, organization and institutional contexts within and between advanced and emerging markets. EM4FIT aims to better understand entrepreneurial management practices both from an individual (intra-organisational) as well as comparative market perspective (inter-organisational). Research will be carried out with an emphasis on the impact of institutions and context on the EU. With the exchange among 16 partners from four continents and between the academic and non-academic sector, EM4FIT brings together knowledge from advanced as well as emerging markets to further understand how entrepreneurs and managers create successful businesses and foster growth. The generated knowledge will be disseminated around the world to enhance the impact of the European entrepreneurial spirit. Involving 67 researchers, managers, technical and administrative staff, the EM4FIT involves seven work packages (WP). In addition to project management and communication, dissemination and outreach activities, five WPs focus on research, training and dissemination at multiple levels: institutional-organizational-individual. With this project structure and the competitive capability of 16 partners involved, EM4FIT will generate high impact both in terms of research excellence and societal engagement. The mix between non-academic and academic participants is designed to create knowledge relevant for businesses and society alike.

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.