Strengthening Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development

The EU is planning to reduce its net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030. To meet these ambitious climate targets, innovative technologies and solutions need to be deployed at unprecedented speed and scale. With this in mind, the SEED+ project aims to nurture a new generation of mission-driven entrepreneurs who will come up with innovative solutions to the most pressing environmental challenges and who will have the skillset to scale them across Europe and internationally. This project is a collaboration between seven academic institutions and five business partners who are geographically spread across regions with varying innovation performance scores.

The project partners share the mutual understanding that if more enterprises are to be generated from university ecosystems across Europe, state-of-the-art entrepreneurship education and support at these universities needs to be better aligned with the actual needs of budding entrepreneurs. To this end, project partners will develop and implement a new entrepreneurship course (Venture Creation Course) aimed at students with technical backgrounds, run local and international startup competitions and accelerate the most promising early-stage ventures. Moreover, business partners will work closely with university partners to set up university enterprise hubs, conduct feasibility studies into university venture capital funds and create transformation roadmaps for each local entrepreneurial ecosystem. All these activities will lead to enhanced entrepreneurial activity of university students and strengthened capacity of universities to support and nurture entrepreneurial talent across Europe.