30 August, 2024

Rebecca Robinson, Hincks Centre Researcher, had the privilege of visiting Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, from the 28th to the 30th of August, 2024.

Rebecca was part of a co-created community of university incubators, researchers, and entrepreneurship educators from across Europe who attended the launch of the ENHANCE Alliance premiere edition of the Community-based Training Programme. This three-day intensive training, led by the training community facilitators team - Karen Williams Middleton, Kristina Dobricic, Anmar Kamaladin, Mats Lundqvist, Yashar Mansoori and Martin Lackéus, was a great way to meet, have interesting discussions, experiment with like-minded people and discover the different ways to implement sustainable entrepreneurship in practice.

The Training Programme began with a quick introduction of the 20 participants from all parts of Europe including The Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. First things first, the team set the scene and established how we would work together for the year. We looked at the Diamond Model of being Entrepreneurial and finished off the day reflecting on value, novelty, agency and learning.

Day 2 began with a session from Karen Williams Midelton on “Team-based dedicated agency” and how to train learners to work in teams that take dedicated action from their hearts. Discussions in small groups emerged on how this can be achieved. Later in the morning we discussed systematic novelty where Mats Lundqvist and Anmar Kamaladin prompted a discussion on some example strategies, tools and methods to achieve this. In the afternoon, we discussed in more detail, sustainable value for others, where Martin Lackéus guided us through some thinking on how to train people to become good a creating real sustainable value for others in society/nature. We finished off the day thinking about action-based activities for agency, novelty and value for others and reflections on the application Loop Me.

Day 3 began with a session from Kristina Dobricic on how to train people to collect learning in a systematic way during their entrepreneurial journey which lead to a discussion on same. This led to the next stage of our action planning, developing further our concepts of action planning from the previous day and sharing with the community. For the latter part of the day we ran a very unconventional session of “unconferencing the conference”. The afternoon was set up in such a way that the topics for discussion that emerged as the most unknown/most interesting or where people wanted to get feedback during the three days were offered up for participants to deliver in a conference style. The community could suggest topics to discuss for 30 minute sessions, where a member of the community was knowledgeable in that topic or sought our discussions on that topic, and other members of the community could choose which sessions to attend based on their own interests or knowledge gaps. This was a fun, informal and condensed way of learning.

It was an inspiring time! Many challenges and opportunities await us over the next 12 months of working together to develop and test different ways of implementing sustainable entrepreneurship.

Rebecca Robinson

Hincks Centre Researcher

To learn more about Rebecca's exciting Chalmers journey please click here.