Becoming Future-ORiented Entrepreneurs in universities and companies

beFORE took on the challenge to transform university entrepreneurship education, company training and business practice. The project consortium developed and released the original educational offer, which would nurture Futures Literate Individuals with improved capacity for analysing and dealing with the unknown future challenges when pursuing a professional career, managing an organisation or developing innovations. The project contributed to building a methodological and theoretical framework for future-oriented entrepreneurship coupled with the development of e-learning based educational solutions, in order to facilitate achieving a desired foresight awareness and maturity levels among entrepreneurs, students and educators.The specific needs of the target groups were analysed in a pan-European survey and effectively addressed in the educational offer composed of: one main and the three auxiliary e-learning courses for students, entrepreneurs and academics. Futures Literacy e-learning courses were tested among target groups in national pilots in: Poland, Italy, Germany and Spain. The European-targeted results of the project provide an effortless starting point for wide implementation across other countries, to which the associated partners (i.e. ISPIM, FEN, EPPM) will contribute to. The project outputs are instrumental in acquiring knowledge and skills: (i) by university teachers and company training providers allowing them to educate Futures Literate Individuals (ii) by entrepreneurs enabling them to take advantage of market and technological opportunities leading to innovations (iii) by students helping them to capture and develop business ideas. The project creates long-term impacts through: (iv) increasing synergies between educational offer of academia and business (v) increasing interdisciplinarity and flexibility of higher educational offer (vi) laying foundations to transform organisations into anticipatory and adaptive systems.