Last Friday the 27th of November the Interreg E-cool team Groningen organised in a meeting in the Health Hub in Roden. The E-cool team Groningen is a unique cooperation between Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen and Alfa-college. The Health Hub Roden is a location where students and partners in multi-level and multidisciplinary configurations address health care challenges from the region.
In this meeting we asked vocational education students from the Alfa college and bachelor students of the Hanze University as ‘experience experts’. The questions were regarding “what they think are good ideas” and “which would have helped them to develop an entrepreneurial attitude in their school career” It is interesting to see whether the students' opinions correspond or differ from those of the stakeholders.
The students of the Health Hub in Roden are involved in all kinds of innovative projects. In particular, they were students with a technical background or study who came up with ideas or prototypes and designed them for people with a physical disability. In this case, 'technology' is combined with 'care'. Some of the students are also interested in innovative entrepreneurship, which came in handy in the assignment from E-Cool.
The aim of the meeting was to rank the 10 formulated good practices of the 10 different partners on three areas: innovation, relevance and transferability. The students had to think about how innovative he/she considers the good practice to be, how relevant it has (been) for him/her and how easy it is to implement in the Dutch education system. The good practices contain very diverse approaches for both higher education and primary school. The main goal of all these good practices is to create a more successful entrepreneurial ecosystem in the different regions and to stimulate entrepreneurship in the mindset of young people. The consequence of this development is that the ecosystems in the regions of the 10 different partners are becoming more attractive for young people to stay and so these areas will grow and develop in many ways.
In this meeting we gave the students a short explanation of each good practice and then asked them to indicate how innovative, relevant and how easy to implement they find the ideas. For the E-Cool project it is very important and interesting to find out how students look at these ideas, as they are directly involved.
We can conclude that it was a very successful meeting at the Health Hub in Roden. The students were very interested in the different ideas, actively participated and discussed the good practices and the scores they gave for relevance, innovativeness and implementability of the different ideas. After reviewing and evaluating the scores given by the students, it turned out that the good practice Youth Entrepreneurship Summer Programme (YES) of Greece - received the highest score. This in contrast to the stakeholders who rated the good practice Project Playpark Brno of the Czech Republic the most interesting which was ranked in 2nd place among the students.
