Liverpool-based The Women’s Organisation has been successful in securing EU funding as part of a partnership programme being led by the University of Iceland

Britain may now have left the EU but The Women’s Organisation in Liverpool is continuing to collaborate in an EU-funded project to improve support for fledgling entrepreneurs across the continent.

The Women’s Organisation has been successful in securing EU funding as part of a partnership programme to support an entrepreneurial approach to skills development, social inclusion and economic growth.

Entrepreneurship360 is a three-year Erasmus+ funded project led by the University of Iceland, working with partners  from Belgium, Finland, Italy and Spain with enterprise experts The Women’s Organisation contributing as UK partner.

Meeting for the first time in Iceland in January to shape the project, the partners have been pooling ideas and expertise to explore the practical implementation of the EntreComp (European Entrepreneurship Competence) Framework.

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This builds directly on The Women’s Organisation’s experience and Enterprise Evolution consultancy services. Building on the success of Entrecomp the development of the Entrepreneurship360 platform will provide a one-stop-shop for the peer networks, guidance, tools, resources and MOOC based training to enable individuals and organisations to understand and use the EntreComp competence framework.

The £240,000 project will run until summer 2022, building a community of practice to connect those applying EntreComp to their learning and work practices. It will explore lifelong learning from formal education through to HR recruitment and start-up and will provide opportunity for representatives from the partner organisations to visit the other countries involved to see how they are already working to support entrepreneurs.

By defining 15 key competences, grouped in three areas: Ideas & opportunities; Resources; and Into action, EntreComp helps to create a shared understanding of the knowledge, skills and attributes that make up what it means to be entrepreneurial. 

The pioneering EntreComp framework is the first cross-continent approach to supporting entrepreneurial ambition now being implemented by organisations and institutions across Europe and will provide a baseline for steering the focus of Entrepreneurship360.

Chief executive of The Women’s Organisation, Maggie O’Carroll, said: “The creation of the Entrecomp framework has been one of the most ground-breaking pieces of work in terms of shaping the international offering around enterprise support we’ve seen for a long time. 

“For more than two decades we’ve been campaigning to ensure those with entrepreneurial ambition have appropriate and essential programmes of support to give them the best chance to start, sustain and grow their businesses.

“Understanding the nuances of entrepreneurship and going a step further to look at how we can make the research, resources and learning around that more accessible across a European platform is an exciting opportunity we are thrilled to be a part of.”

The first step of implementing Entrepreneurship360 will be for the team to engage with others who are applying the Entrecomp framework or interesting in exploring how they could use the learning to inform their work.