Hubhouse – Sensitization
About this good practice
Between 2006 and 2014, the Regional council in collaboration with Universities have created 7 Hubhouses on the Nord-Pas de Calais territory. By having early hands-on experience in carrying out their project, young people develop entrepreneurial values and skills for their future professional insertion.
Regional authorities and HEI understood they have to make their elected body strongly support students' entrepreneurship. They co-organise a mutual governance to drive entrepreneurship awareness in Universities through Hubhouses.
One of the main Hubhouses task is to raise students and teachers awareness to entrepreneurship. They run three kind of actions:
1) Information: inform about what is entrepreneurship, how they can help and provide support, inform about the entrepreneurship ecosystem and programmes/support services that are available within the region.
2) Raising awareness: to open students’ eyes to entrepreneurship spirit by developing their entrepreneurship skills (daring, curiosity, creativity, leadership and taking initiatives).
3) Experimentation: to learn by doing. They experiment in concrete actions how to find and formalise an idea, they discover their capacity for action, and they gain the first market study, legal and financial basic knowledge.
The concept: an entrepreneurship workspace in university where students can meet experts, participate to conferences and have training.
Resources needed
3 FTE, total budget: 150 K € - 200 K €
Evidence of success
Since 2014, the Hubhouse sensitized around 140 000 students. It’s about 37 500 students per year between 2014 and 2016 and around 32 000 students/per year between 2016 and 2018.
Each year, the Hubhouse supports between 250 to 310 students entrepreneurial projects and there is an average of 30 business creation per year.
Potential for learning or transfer
Support from the local authorities is compulsory. This practice shows how the two main institutional actors for learning and professional insertion of students can work together. The interest of the practise is in the governance carried out to boost students’ entrepreneurship.
Key success factors for a transfer :
1) Work directly with the institutional representatives
2) Mobilise the stakeholders from the beginning of the reflection