European policymakers continuously highlight the importance of entrepreneurial and transversal skills for the next generations of students, researchers and innovators to build a resilient society that is able to learn lifelong. In fact, the priority given to entrepreneurship education (EE) is an integral part of every current key policy document (e.g. European Skills Agenda) or strategic plan (e.g. Plan for European Education Area) relating to education inside the EU.Evidently, schools and universities take on a central role for developing entrepreneurial competences amongst learners. Moreover, the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework (EntreComp) states the case that the ability to think and act entrepreneurially should be considered not only relevant for graduates that seek careers as entrepreneurs. Rather, entrepreneurial competences matter to all learners in all walks of life.Despite this, EE is not embedded deeply across disciplines and subjects yet. With our Partnership for Initial Entrepreneurship Teacher Education (PIETE) we wanted to make a contribution to change that in the field of initial teacher education (ITE). However, operationalising EntreComp in this context was a challenging experiment. After 3 years of intensive work, we can proudly claim that we were successful in doing so. In terms of intellectual outputs, we have accomplished the following:- a scalable methodology for ITE framework reports that allows to map functionalities, educational priorities and institutional necessities of ITE higher education institutions (esp. for non-ITE stakeholder; applied to contexts of ITE institutions in Poland, Hungary, and Austria)- an EE Capacity Building Compilation to facilitate workshops that foster EE capacity building in the ITE context (applied to 50+ educators during project lifetime)- an EE Teaching Compendium for use in ITE (composed of 15 modules, structurally aligned to EntreComp, pilot-tested among 200+ ITE students & 20 ITE educators- an online EE Awareness Test Center suite that allows to assess conceptual understandings and knowledgeability levels of EE (applied to 170+ ITE educators in Hungary, Austria, and Poland)- a peer reviewed discussion paper on the topic of EE in ITE that analysed the data of the Test Center (from HU, AT, POL)- a Good Practice Collection that showcases 12 EU & outside EU initiatives that successfully put EE into practice within ITE & school contextsPIETE relied on a team of dedicated experts from the fields of entrepreneurship and pre-service teacher education (PIETE Regional Tandems) of 7 organisations from 5 EU countries that were highly motivated to take on the challenge of embedding ITE into EE.Our project has impacted ITE educators & students of the involved organisations (target regions: Szeged - Hungary, Tirol - Austria, Silesia - Poland) and set the base to influence generations of learners taught by them. Given that aspiring teachers educated now will be exercising their profession until the 2060s and beyond, the powerful impact cascade inherent in PIETE becomes evident. This, together with the large dissemination and high quality display of our project results online provides an excellent basis to leverage and sustain PIETE outcomes post project funding. However, with PIETE we did not try to be dogmatic about entrepreneurship education and its place within initial teacher education, but rather realistic on its current relevance for respective educators in their given educational contexts. Moreover, we needed to raise awareness for the benefits of EE first, especially when conceptually understood in a wider sense (as exemplified by EntreComp) before we tried to convince ITE educators to join us on our entrepreneurial journey. This careful and respectful approach has been key success element of PIETE. Besides, we also needed to build a general understanding inside our partnership for how the education of future teachers is rolled out in the PIETE target regions and institutions - not only, but also to become aware of potential barriers and institutional constraints that may hinder introducing more elements of entrepreneurship education to existing teaching activities.These core elements “opened the doors” for integrating EE into ITE. Naturally, a small-scale project like PIETE can only provide excellent starting conditions to enhance and sustain this development. With the end of the project, it is in the hands of the regional tandems, but foremost, each involved ITE partner, to decide on how to continue their entrepreneurial journey. All of them have expressed their commitment to do so with well reflected and context-depending measures. PIETE has prepared them well to go further, inspire others to do alike and, thus, to contribute to the development of entrepreneurial teachers as called for by European policy makers.

Target group of students at secondary vocational schools are young people at an important stage of their decisions for their future life direction. Students often do not know what they want to do in the future, only a small number of students want to become self-employers. Young people do not have a clear view on how to introduce innovative ideas, from the first idea to its launch on the market and its marketing and PR. During their studies many of the VET school students gain knowledge and skills in a specific field, so they have a good basis for the eventual start their own businesses. The schools, however, still put the emphasis more on formal skills. The school system doesn't support the development of creativity a lot. Although entrepreneurship education is part of the educational curriculum, in practice we can only see subjects focused on general knowledge of economics and management, without more specific focus on the development of entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and attitudes.Students also don't have sufficient presentation skills, they often have troubles with speaking in public, sell their ideas and clearly articulate their intentions.Find your inner inventor (FYII) project addressed the above mentioned issues. The main objective of the project was to develop and verify in practice the training module called Find your inner inventor. The module was intended to be used by VET schools as a supplement to the teaching of Economics and Business subjects.Sub-objectives of the project were as follows:- to analyse the educational needs of students of VET schools in product development and business skills- to develop key competencies of students of VET, especially transversal skills: creativity, effective presentations, entrepreneurship- to show students a comprehensive business process project cycle from developing an idea to its launching to the market- to give students contact with the scientific communities and eliminate their fear of science- to improve the presentation skills of the students. The main target group were VET students. The project partnership included three academic partners:- VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, the Czech Republic- University of Bielsko-Biala, Poland and- University of Iceland, Iceland.Within the project the partners cooperated together and used their specific skills in the field.First of all we did the analysis of the educational needs of VET school students. Based on the results of the Analysis, the objectives of a module were set up, a structure of a programme was prepared and then partners started working on the particular parts of the FYII Course.The FYII programme consists of 5 educational days + the dissemination event at the end of the Course. When the developing phase was over, we put the Programme into practice (testing phase) and checked the results (feedback from the students and teachers). We introduced the programme to the VET schools we cooperated with. There were more than 400 students involved in the testing phase of the Course. At the end of the testing phase we did the final correction of the programme according the received feedback and prepared a brochure for VET schools. The final conferences took place in each participating country. The events were intended for the teachers of the VET schools and other stakeholders that were not a part of this project to introduce a programme to them.The impact of our project was aimed at VET schools as well as at universities. Both groups acquired a new experience, number of new competences as well as they developed their present ones. The programme aimed at showing students that running their own business is not impossible. The programme can help students in their future decissions connected to their own self-emploability or choosing their future studies. VET teachers first of all gained a new methodology that can be used in their teaching of economy and business subjects. They also got an experience that learning by doing is very effective way of developing students‘ copmpetencies. We have the complex methodology of Find your inner inventor available in English and national languages as well in order to be used not only for us but also for other schools and universities interested in this kind of programme.