Development of a network infrastructure for youth innovation entrepreneurship support on fablab platforms

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.