DANISH ENTREPRENEURSHIP AWARD The DNA of Danish Entrepreneurship Award
THE DNA OF DANISH ENTREPRENEURSHIP AWARD Why do we undertake Danish Entrepreneurship Award? With Danish Entrepreneurship Award we want to create a platform filled with inspiration and motivation for students, teachers and businesspeople so that even more want to develop new ideas, innovate and act on their ideas! With Danish Entrepreneurship Award we want to support education and personal learning. With Danish Entrepreneurship Award we want to create a day of celebration where we celebrate and praise the good ideas and the initiation of new enterprises. Celebration/Award Learning Inspiration and motivation Inspiration and motivation Danish Entrepreneurship Award is an inspiration for students who are already working on developing and implementing good and unique ideas. Meanwhile, it inspires others so that even more want to come up with new ideas, innovate and act on their ideas! Danish Entrepreneurship Award is the inspiration set to create further motivation so ideas may be implemented and create economic, cultural or social value locally within Denmark or globally. Therefore the Award gathers knowledge and experience from the educational and corporate worlds, as well as research both nationally and internationally. Danish Entrepreneurship Award will therefore create a platform that: Provides motivation to enterprising students. Mediates the good stories about entrepreneurship in education as well as in the corporate world. Gives inspiration to teachers and educators so that they will gain new ideas and input for their teaching. Creates profitable relations between students and the corporate world, as well as across different academic borders, ages and knowledge. Danish Entrepreneurship Award finds it very important that the knowledge presented is current, essential and thought-provoking. Inspiration and motivation will meanwhile create an atmosphere facilitating new networks and create awareness about entrepreneurship in an eventful atmosphere. It is a day where students, teachers, educators and business people are in action outside their accustomed physical surroundings. They will experience new things, meet new trends in education, innovation and in relation to products and services.
Learning The contestants participating in the Danish Entrepreneurship Award will benefit both academically as well as personally. Danish Entrepreneurship Award therefore encourages that the content can be incorporated in different learning processes. Learning at Danish Entrepreneurship Award will be visible through counseling, networks and new knowledge. Meanwhile, the variety of businesspeople will enable that the students are able to learn something new through new relations. The Award therefore stimulates entrepreneurial processes where students will be in contact with both known and unknown relations from the outside world. This frame of learning is based on an open-minded vision of the outside world. The contestants enter a universe where they meet across educational levels, academic fields and nationalities. Danish Entrepreneurship Award will present knowledge and activities that will teach the students how to get their idea to the next level. The ideas are pushed from being thoughts towards the realization of a concrete product or service, and, through the competitions, they will be challenged on their creative, organizational and communicative abilities. Danish Entrepreneurship Award would like to support the learning dimensions 1 : Action: innovation, value-creating initiatives, communication and teamwork. Creativity: create ideas, discover opportunities, innovation and solving problems and meeting challenges. Environment: understanding cultures, contexts, markets and economy. Attitude: faith in one s own ability, to overcome uncertainty, dare fail and be ethical. Celebration/Award An Award is a celebration. Danish Entrepreneurship Award is a day of celebration. It is a day where everyone who connects teaching and education with entrepreneurship will be celebrated from ABC to Ph.D. The day of celebration is for students, teachers, educators and the public as well as the private corporate world. The entrepreneurs of the future are particularly celebrated because Danish Entrepreneurship Award is the place where students with good and original ideas will be awarded a prize in an Idea Competition the biggest on Danish soil. Danish Entrepreneurship Award is therefore a unique platform where light will be shed on ideas and they will be celebrated. The students will move on to new opportunities through inspiration, motivation and learning. New highs can be reached because of the fact that students will meet others with good ideas, academic knowledge and great experience within the many fields and challenges in the entrepreneurial processes. 1 For more information: http://www.ffe-ye.dk/media/44723/progression-model-english.pdf
THE STORY As a part of the Global Entrepreneurship Week, Danish Entrepreneurship Award was a pilot project held in 2011. The Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship will conduct Danish Entrepreneurship Award for the fifth time in 2015 as a physical manifest of the Foundation s mission and vision. You can see the video from Danish Entrepreneurship Award 2014 by following this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llqpveztmf4 What can the participants experience on the day? We want to create a day filled with surprising experiences for students which will result in change. On their way home they should think of this day as being the best school day ever, regardless of them being from primary school, secondary school or higher education. The day is built around the ideas/companies the students have worked with in connection to their entrepreneurship education during the autumn semester. November 19 is the day where the different teams will compete with the best developed ideas/companies. They will present their idea/company to one of the many participating businesspeople. Whether they are participating as a judge, mentor or speaker, all the participating businesspeople will be giving a day to Denmark s future pro bono. The day will furthermore consist of entrepreneurial learning as well as experience based learning, which can also be found in the big exhibition area where all senses are involved. This is rooted in a learning view in which young people learn more if they are happy and involved. The exhibition area will contain: Advisory Zone This is where ideas are given feedback and advise Creativity Zone This is where ideas are visualized through creative methods and innovative processes Lecture Zone This is where role models inspire new ideas, transforming ideas into action and tell of their own journeys Design Zone This is where young designers show their creations Networking Zone This is where the teams meet, find new contacts and share ideas Workshop Zone This is where the teams concentrate on short workshops Learning Zone This is where teachers and educators meet and are inspired Competition Zone This is where the ideas are presented and given feedback from the industry Chill Out Zone This is where the entrepreneurs relax and make room for more ideas What is the goal of Danish Entrepreneurship Award 2015: 5000 participants with a great, educational day both before, during and after the day itself. A high degree of local involvement so that a lasting impression is left on the Triangle Region, resulting in more students receiving education in innovation Increased involvement from the industry as judges, sponsors and lecturers
International focus in the form of lecturers and participating students All lecturers work pro bono A high degree of participation from our partnering Ministries ABOUT THE DANISH FOUNDATION FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP The goal for the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship is, in collaboration with the partnering Ministries, the educational sector as well as the Danish industry, to ensure that education in entrepreneurship reaches students at all levels of education. Entrepreneurship should be a natural part of the Danish educational system and will help increase the standards so that Danes will be among the best and most creative and enterprising. Growth is all-important Taking the growth policy of the current government into account, it is fairly obvious that the growth in Denmark has to be secured. As a small nation in a globalised world Denmark has to differentiate in order to create long-term growth. This will happen through a combination of the establishment of a multitude of new companies and innovation within established companies. Both in the public as well as the private sector, there is an increased focus on innovation and entrepreneurship, and the employees within both sectors will increasingly have to rethink procedures, processes and products to the benefit of both the individual employee, the workplace and society as a whole. This kind of entrepreneurship will ensure that opportunities, not hindrances, are created on the way to a modern growth society. Several parallel surveys emphasize that an essential source of economic growth is that more and more Danes develop entrepreneurial competences through their educations. These are competences that include the capacity to act on opportunities, good ideas as well as experiences and transform them into value for others. Value can be of a cultural, social or economic variety. However, these competences are neither developed nor strengthened unless they become an integral part of the education system. The Fountain of Knowledge Creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation are not genetically bound to certain people born under a lucky star. They are qualities that can be developed in everyone through education and training. In the European Union, entrepreneurship is viewed as a core competency today in line with mathematical and communicative competences. Entrepreneurship in education is good for all of us, even if you have no intention of starting your own company. Competences like creativity, communication, teamwork, the ability to solve problems and to make decisions and act on them are all strengthened through learning about entrepreneurship. These are abilities and skills that students can hardly live without in the future. This is nicely in line with the objective of the government better and more education in order to ensure growth and prosperity in future.
The obvious effects of entrepreneurship in education The work of the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship to introduce entrepreneurship into education has already had obvious effects, both in that more and more teachers and educators see the value of teaching with a focus on entrepreneurship as well as the number of students who participate in that kind of education. The work is manifold: from further education of educators and teachers, development of programmes and materials to inspiring events for teachers and students. Furthermore we conduct large impact measurements and mapping surveys which are highly respected internationally. The Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship, our Ministry partners and our joint work from ABC to Ph.D. regarding entrepreneurship is not merely recognised in Denmark. The Foundation is regularly contacted by other countries that wish to learn from the experiences created here. The source of Denmark s growth is highly dependent on students obtaining competences that can develop them into the responsible citizens of the future, as well as entrepreneurs and innovators. Our work has turned out to be effective, and we would like to strengthen the effort in collaboration with the government, educational sector and the Danish industry, and add even more energy to the work in future.