News
EQUAL's Tool
for Inclusive Entrepreneurship: seven more supporters
November 2007
Oviedo in the North of Spain provided the venue for two
days of intense discussions about how to extend EQUAL's "Community of Practice"
on Inclusive Entrepreneurship to more Member States and Regions during the vital
transition period between the old and new Structural Fund Programmes.
The Community of Practice on Inclusive Entrepreneurship
(CoPIE) is one of seven pilot projects supported by the European Commission to
test new forms of support for transnational cooperation on issues of major
concern to the European Social Fund. CoPIE aims to establish "a European
platform of excellence for all those interested in sharing and improving both
practice and policy for opening up entrepreneurship to more people during the
next round of the Structural Funds."
Just before the summer, Nikolaus van der Pas, the Director
General of DG Employment, said: "To continue their work till 2013, I believe
we need to build a platform for inclusive entrepreneurship in the new Structural
Funds period." He added: "We need to make start-ups by so-called
'disadvantaged' people a normal thing, and transnational work is an important
part of achieving that". At Oviedo, representatives from the Czech Republic,
Romania, Ireland, Flanders, Germany and four Spanish regions (Asturias,
Andalucía, Extremadura, and the Basque Country) agreed to follow this advice and
launch the second phase of CoPIE's activities.
On behalf of Germany and Flanders, the lead partners behind
CoPIE, Bettina Reuters explained how the main ideas of the platform had arisen
from the work of over several hundred partnerships during the last five years of
EQUAL. During this period, she said that a group of Member States had not only
come to realise that they faced a series of common problems but also that they
had a lot to learn from the solutions tested among them. "We have to establish
the mechanisms to allow all the experience we have built up to be applied in the
mainstream programmes and not wasted as has often happened in the past" she
insisted.
Three tools for mainstreaming past and future lessons
Paul Soto,
one of CoPIE's European experts, went on to describe how this common concern had
led to the realisation that a large number of the problems and solutions tested
by EQUAL partnerships in the field of inclusive entrepreneurship fell into four
major categories – building the culture and conditions for entrepreneurship,
integrated business support for all, access to appropriate finance, ensuring
consolidation and growth. One of the important conclusions of EQUAL was that
these four elements should not be dealt with in isolation. They were all part of
what has now become know as EQUAL's "entrepreneurial ladder out of social
exclusion".
The advantage of the ladder is that it provides a common
language for us to talk to each other and transfer lessons and experience at a
European level, said Peter Ramsden. He explained how CoPIE is using this common
framework to developing three interlinked tools. The first is an assessment
matrix to help regions to look at their business support systems from the point
of view of disadvantaged groups - to see where they are strong - and to identify
where they are weak and need to do develop new solutions. This has already been
tested in five regions of Europe.
The second tool consists of an improved system for finding
and exchanging good practice in the areas where regions have identified that
they want more information. Finally, all this needs to be weaved together to
build regional action plans for inclusive entrepreneurship. The main aim of the
workshop in Oviedo was to provide information and training to help develop these
three tools and role them out in other regions.
Using the snowball principle to extend inclusive
entrepreneurship across Europe
One of the principles of Communities of Practice is that they
build on the enthusiasm and experience of their members to build and spread
knowledge. So CoPIE is using the experts who tested the assessment matrix in
Wales, Asturias, Berlin, Lisbon and Flanders as mentors for a second round of
regions who want to apply the tool.
The bridge between these two phases was provided in Oviedo by
Dominic Mullen who has tested the tool in Ireland on behalf of the three EQUAL
partnerships involved in business creation. He explained how they and
interviewed around 15 policy makers and 35 policy advisors. They had also
interviewed around 35 entrepreneurs that used EQUAL services and were going to
compare this to a similar number that had not benefited from EQUAL in order to
bring out the added value.
Dominic explained how the tool had been adapted to the Irish
situation. They had streamlined the questions and improved their comparability
as well as concentrating on the target groups that were of most concern in
Ireland – women, ethnic minorities and the long term unemployed. It was very
useful to have a practical example of the kinds of issues identified by the tool
– the disjointed nature of policy making and implementation, the lack of
effective outreach services, the lack of role models, the difficulties and cost
of obtaining premises, the gaps in Ireland's innovative Work Enterprise
Allowance and so on.
After this the participants split into two groups – Romania,
the Czech Republic, Germany and Ireland in one and the "Iberian Alliance" of
three Spanish Regions and Portugal in another. The first group was led by Caryl
Cresswell who had applied the assessment matrix in Wales while the second was
led by Rafael Vigil who had done the same in Asturias. They took the new regions
through a practical exercise of filling in the four main sections of the tool.
This allowed the participants to raise all sorts of vital questions like how to
identify and interview policy makers, advisors and users, how many and what form
of interviews and at what spatial scale to carry out the exercise.
Several participants asked whether the assessment matrix
should be seen primarily as a transnational bench-marking tool and in this case
how many interviews were required to obtain statistically valid results. The
reply from the existing members of CoPIE was that the main value of the matrix
was in creating a dynamic platform or space for dialogue between the different
stakeholders involved in business support in a given region or country. The tool
often brought people from different backgrounds together for the first time and
allowed people to think outside the box by looking at the whole picture in a
trans-national perspective. This approach means that while it is necessary to
have certain common, core elements, it is also possible to be flexible, to add
in features and adapt the tool to the context in each country.
The first day of the workshop ended with an encouraging
speech from Manuel Capellán Pérez the Director General of Professional Training,
who insisted on the commitment of the Regional Government of Asturias to using
tools such as those developed by CoPIE to explore new solutions to increasing
entrepreneurship among all groups of society. This was followed by an excellent
site visit to the Technological City of Valnalon.
From red problems to green solutions
Of
course knowing that you have a problem is just the start of the process. So the
second day of the workshop was devoted to looking at two further tools that
CoPIE is developing to help regions move from the areas that are flagged up by
the assessment tool in red - as problems - to those areas which appear in green
- as strengths.
The
first is the prototype of a more intelligent system for linking the areas that
regions feel they need to find out more about – to other regions who already
have experience and transferable solutions in the same field. So far CoPIE has
created a data bank of around 100 different products of this kind using the same
categories as the assessment tool.
A
perfect example of how this tool could develop was provided the night before by
the visit to the Technological City of Valnalon. Within an impressive range of
activities to support entrepreneurship education in schools, Valnalon has
developed a business game based upon secondary students forming cooperatives
which trade internationally with the cooperatives formed by students in other
countries. The methodology and training material has already been implanted in 8
Spanish regions and 11 other countries and it is ready to be transferred to
more.
Peter
Ramsden went on to describe the surprising range of activities and actors that
communities of practice can involve in order to promote the transfer of this
kind of knowledge across Europe. "We have to move away from a situation where a
case study of good practice is a once and for all exercise handed down by an
external expert for others to consume. It must be possible for interested people
to walk into a case, examine it from different angles, ask questions, adapt it
to different circumstances and keep it up to date" he said.
With
this aim in mind CoPIE is identifying a series of subthemes like
entrepreneurship education, quality standards and training for advisors, and
action plans for inclusive entrepreneurship where regions wish to cooperate. The
next steps will be to improve and animate CoPIE's website, to test new more
dynamic and participative formats like wikis for case studies and to promote
exchange in the "hot" topics. To start the ball rolling each participant at the
workshop explained the areas they would like to find out more about and those
where they felt they had experience to offer. The list can be consulted on the
CoPIE website.
Action plans for opening up entrepreneurship to all.
The last and final tool being developed by CoPIE ties all the
previous parts together by developing action plans for inclusive
entrepreneurship. As an example, Iain Willox and Caryl Cresswell explained how
the Welsh Entrepreneurship Action Plan had emerged and successfully been
implemented. They said that there were a series of basic thematic components to
most regional action plans which linked in very closely to the main themes in
CoPIE's assessment tool. But the hardest thing, according to Iain Willox was not
just to decide on the priorities (the budget for each) but on who would lead
which area. Rafael Rossi followed this up by explaining how EQUAL had been
used in Andalucia to redesign the map of "who did what and how" in the regional
system for supporting entrepreneurship.
Next steps
The meeting ended with each of the participants explaining
the steps that they will take. Regions like Asturias, who have already tested
the tool plan to hold a stakeholder meetings to start discussions on an action
plan.
In addition to the ongoing work in Ireland, at least six new
regions or areas plan to test the assessment matrix: one region in the Czech
Republic and Romania, Andalucía and the Basque Country (or parts of them), the
whole of Extremadura, a region from the North and South of Portugal (with the
possibility of extending it further through Action 3 of EQUAL) and Rhineland
Palatinate.
The conditions vary enormously between these areas. For
example, in countries like Romania and the Czech Republic the subject is quite
new and it is necessary to build trust and support gradually In Extremadura,
Gloria Gonzalez Oyola the General Director of Employment and Training explained
that "the CoPIE tools come at just the right moment because we are redesigning
our entire employment strategy and are committed to opening up entrepreneurship
to wider parts of society".
Top
