The Employment Package (2012) recognised the potential of entrepreneurship in contributing to a job-rich recovery, while the Entrepreneurship Action Plan 2020 highlights that universities should become more entrepreneurial, recommends promoting entrepreneurship education and to support groups that are under-represented among entrepreneurs. In addition, the European Parliament’s report on EU policy for cultural and creative industries (June 2016) recommends to the EC “the creation within HIE institutions of relevant joint programmes between arts & culture, business and technology for the development of work-learn trajectories”.Europe's cultural & creative industries (CCIs) offer a real potential to contribute to the EU 2020 strategy. Studies show that CCIs represent highly innovative companies with great economic potential and are one of EU's most dynamic sectors contributing around 4.5% to the EU GDP and providing quality jobs to around 3.8% of total workforce. CCIs are also important drivers of economic innovation in other sectors.At the crossroads of creativity and entrepreneurship, it remains difficult for CCIs to find creative arts graduates with a mix of creative and entrepreneurship skills to set-up companies. One of the main reasons for that is that HIE is not following in entrepreneurship´s footsteps. In fact, in the EU, only one-third of entrepreneurs have tertiary education (Eurostat 2014). You have more possibilities to become an entrepreneur if you don’t pursue university careers! There is clearly a lack of innovative entrepreneurship education for creative arts graduates throughout EU.A pan European investor network for the CCI (MEDIA DEALS), 4 universities with mixed teams from creative arts & business departments (EUC, UAB, UPV, UIC) and a SME focused on EdTech and on digital art (MYD), declare the ambition to create synergy of expertise and innovate through a specific targeted entrepreneurship methodology, supporting curricular materials and IT tools for faculties in cultural and creative arts fields so that once graduated, alumni will create their own businesses. 4ArtPreneur project wants to empower culture & creative arts faculties, deans, students, professors, professionals and policymakers so they become more permeable to the acquisition, validation and share of entrepreneurship skills aligned to the specific needs of the entrepreneurship world in the CCI.One of the most effective ways to introduce the entrepreneurship is through Project-Based Learning (PBL) and Student-Centered approaches. 4ArtPreneur will not tend to have a singular focus on students taking more business-oriented courses. It will tend towards the acquisition of INNOVATIVE THINKING competences needed for starting up the new type of CCIs SMEs that operate in a complex and fast-moving eco-system, where networking and experimenting are paramount. Teaching innovative thinking competences well beyond traditional business skills, exploring target group specific methods to simulate the business behaviours at the university; providing innovative digital tools to evidence the learned competencies for when the moment will come to face financiers, are new framework conditions that 4ArtPreneur will pursue.4ArtPreneur develops next IOS:• An innovative methodology supported by several teaching & learning SYSTEM DYNAMICS materials. System dynamics models will put forward and simulate the behaviour of business cases suggested by partners and local working groups. The models will be used for computer simulation.• A modular ENTREPRENEURSHIP CURRICULUM, that will correspond to 3 ECTS credits, will be developed and integrated into the system dynamics methodology. The curriculum´s teaching & learning materials will be embedded into the system dynamics models that simulate the business cases/topics.• The adaptation & improvement of a European E-PORTFOLIO (IT tool) so that creative arts students can collect and show evidence of their entrepreneurial skills to confront future investment prospects. By identifying the entrepreneurial skills, a student has gained through his various experiences and how they relate to the business career he is interested in and by putting them in an easily understood e-portfolio format, will help him better articulate his skills when facing investment opportunities being offered while simultaneously alleviating investor fears and concerns.Training & face to face or blending learning implementation actions, one transnational and several local ones, will ensure that the project is not only FOR creative arts professors, students & alumni but also BY them.With 4ArtPreneur, professors, deans & policymakers will dispose of an adequate framework. Obviously, they can find already shaped entrepreneurship competencies frameworks. The difficulties come when they want to implement these non-specific frameworks to make creative arts degrees more permeable to entrepreneurial skills. 4ArtPreneur will provide it.

InnoCreate is an ambitious coordination and support action aiming to stimulate the growth of the creative industries in Europe by overcoming challenges at individual SME level (small size, problems with access to finance, barriers to new market entry…), at the innovation support level (disparity in availability and quality of support) and at overall creative industry level (fragmentation, localisation…). InnoCreate will respond by networking innovation support players and harnessing their regional strengths into a European ecosystem of supports to respond more effectively to SME needs. Two specific end user groups of SMEs will be targeted through InnoCreate: creative industry SMEs exploiting advanced technologies and ICT SMEs innovating in the field of creative industries. Both of these target groups will be equally supported. SMEs will benefit from an imaginative programme of communication and support actions: InnoCreate will piggy-back on the Creative Business Cup to raise awareness about the ICT Challenge competition, network SMEs throughout Europe at the InnoCreate International Camps and provide customised one to one supports for the most promising SMEs with high growth potential. InnoCreate galvanises existing structures by bringing together three strong existing European networks – EBN, CKO and the ECB Network and a network of innovation multipliers at regional level. The InnoCreate service offering aims to be immediately accessible online and ‘on-site’ in 15 EU partner and associate partner countries with a target of engaging further stakeholders to deliver the support services in all EU member states by the project end. The impact of InnoCreate will be tangible – for individual SMEs, for innovation support actors and for the growth of the European creative industries as a whole.

It is generally acknowledged that the web entrepreneurship sector can contribute significantly to the competiveness and economic growth of countries and regions. However, Europe is clearly lagging behind given that even though there are lots of European web start-ups, most of them rarely grow up to become global leaders. In this context, the position of women seems particularly weak given that only a very small percentage of them are web entrepreneurs. Taking into account the limited development of web entrepreneurship in Europe as well as the limited participation of women in the web economy the WeHubs project seeks to create a favourable environment for women web entrepreneurs, by linking together local fragmented ecosystems nodes, and foster networking and exploitation of synergies, into the first European Network for Women Web Entrepreneurs Hubs. In this respect the project is aimed at providing a strong support to women web entrepreneurs and existing web entrepreneur’s ecosystems enabling the latter to provide dedicated services to women. As a result the project will foster the creation and scaling of web start-ups created by women (impact on women), strengthen the existing web entrepreneurs ecosystems through networking and complementary services (impact on ecosystems) and support the emergence of a dynamic European ecosystem for women web entrepreneurs contributing to the formulation of relevant policies, support the implementation of start-up Europe initiative and the wider enforcement of the European digital sector (policy impact).