Online Businesses are significantly different from traditional businesses due to a variety of factors such as relatively low entry costs, high word of mouth, low incremental costs, high efficiency of viral marketing strategies amongst others. Quick deployment, rapid prototyping, low cost of market tests and introduction along with the right business model and pricing strategy are some of the vital elements that can ensure success or failure. These challenges are quite daunting to cope even for seasoned entrepreneurs but much more challenging for younger entrepreneurs. While several startup initiatives, business accelerators and localised business support ecosystems have come up to provide these specialised skills and support services, the main barriers to a large scale web entrepreneurship ecosystem in Europe are: i) A significant gap between University Students who form the largest pool of potential young entrepreneurs and the business accelerators providing support to such initiatives. ii) Lack of internetworking between the various business accelerators, investors, mentors to coordinate their activities to reach a much wider audience across the widely dispersed European communities. iii) Lack of Business Analytical Tools that can help digital startups optimise their business models and pricing decisions. There is a strong need to develop an ecosystem of web entrepreneurship, where budding entrepreneurs can find the right support to let their ideas blossom into viable business models, with access to the necessary inputs such as funding, mentoring, and access to the necessary technical resources and IT skills. That is why 2 business accelerators from 2 different European regions: Portugal and Scandinavia came together to develop a coordinated set of support actions with the coordination of an academic partner (UNIDEMI) to leverage the use of the largest European Startup Web- Platform F6S for a range of activities that support web-startups.

EXPAND will develop a toolbox for implementing ‘Challenge Based Idea Accelerators’ and run a first Idea Accelerator focused on homelessness.The toolbox is aimed at higher education teaching staff and will enable a practical new method responding to the need for more civic engagement, developing new problem solving skills and stimulate social entrepreneurship in students. The proposed project builds on the creativity of students combined with design thinking and challenge-based education to tackle societal challenges, with a focus on homelessness in the pilot programme. We call out for students, innovators, creative thinkers, tech people and the higher education world, in particular, to join forces and bring heavyweight social challenges in the spotlight. Our project aims to forge unlikely alliances across a wide spectrum of partners to define a viable, replicable and scalable methodology for tackling systemic societal problems.In this project, we will design a 4 month idea-accelerator with a strong focus on the needs analysis of the challenge in question resulting in a public demo day.The alliance will consist of business school teaching staff, design thinking experts, social enterprise leaders with expertise on how to tackle the issue and startup professionals. These different actors will work together in order to finetune the methods to the specific environment and challenge, in this case homelessness.

<< Background >>In times of a more disruptive, complex, and dynamic world than ever experienced before, innovation is no longer a luxury, but a precondition for business survival. To tackle this innovation dilemma, forward-thinking established organizations are teaming up with fast, creative startups. However, the majority of European organizations and universities are not designed for corporate entrepreneurship and struggle to reap the benefits of co-innovation yet.<< Objectives >>Therefore, the Corship Knowledge Alliance set out to connect different players of the innovation ecosystem (startups, established organizations and universities) through innovative training and facilitation schemes (a MOOC, a MicroCredential, a digital toolbox) to enable them to better exploit the promising approach of co-innovation, which is an emerging dimension of corporate entrepreneurship. This shall create a joint language and understanding for the benefits and pitfalls of co-innovation.<< Implementation >>To this end, Corship has designed and implemented the first MOOC on Co-Innovation, building on 33 interviews and the experience of the 7 partners, representing different innovation ecosystem stakeholders across Europe. This was followed up with a MicroCredential pilot, a digital deep-dive for selected MOOC participants. A digital toolbox with the Co-Innovation Builder in its center facilitated the learners. All outcomes were implemented as planned and stay available beyond project lifetime.<< Results >>The project demonstrated significant impact and over-achieved its ambitious KPIs. The MOOC attracted more than +2.800 learners from the envisioned target groups with platform-all-time-high completion rates, interaction levels and course satisfaction. 43 learners received the opportunity for taking the MicroCredential and the toolbox draw +11.000 visitors. The learners created their own community and 11 collaboration agreements have been signed with organization for a sustainable uptake.

Information technology has driven, directly or indirectly, much of Europe’s economic growth during the last decades as the role of data transitioned from the support of business decisions to becoming a good in itself. An open approach towards data value creation has become critical in the new networked economy, with Europe well placed to nurture this new revolution. However, to date Europe’s data economy has yet to achieve the same levels of growth as those in the US and Asia. Data Pitch will seek to address this critical gap by creating a transnational, Europe-wide data innovation ecosystem that will bring together data owners and Big Data technology providers, with startups and SMEs with fresh ideas for data-driven products and services. Our project will: - explore the critical factors that impact the way organisations create value from sharing data; - organise a competition addressing economic, societal, and environmental challenges, present and future, to identify promising digital innovators and data-empowered solutions; - create a cross-sectoral, secure data experimentation facility which will offer the winners of this competition a purposeful environment to nurture their ideas; and - support them by solving common concerns through funding, technical, legal, marketing, and commercial assistance. Drawing on the experience from key players in the consortium, we will establish a European Data Innovation Lab (DIL), guided and promoted by the hugely visible engagement channels and commentators at the Guardian and an international network of hundreds of organisations that have already confirmed their intention to join forces with and support Data Pitch. Together with them we will make the European data economy stronger and help the region re-gain leadership in innovation through digital transformation.