Projektleiter: Prof. Dr. Gerhard de Haan

Projektkoordinator: Stefanie Ollenburg

Projektunterstützung: Miriam Chrosch, Studentische Mitarbeiterin

Laufzeit: 2017–2019

Förderung durch: Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance

Website: http://futureoriented.eu

The consortium of the EU Erasmus+ beFORE project took on the challenge to transform university entrepreneurship education, company training, and business practice by bringing together academic, research and business partners from Poland, Italy, Spain and Germany to develop an educational offer in Futures Literacy. The objective is to generate Futures Literate Individuals, who have an improved capacity for analysing and dealing with unknown future challenges, for example when pursuing a professional career, managing an organisation, or developing innovations. In order to facilitate in achieving the desired foresight awareness among the project’s target groups entrepreneurs, students, and academics the project pursed to build a methodological and theoretical framework for future-orientation, leading to an e-learning based educational solution. 

The aim of the project in short-term is that its output become instrumental in acquiring knowledge and skills: (i) by university teachers and company training providers allowing them to educate Futures Literate Individuals (ii) by entrepreneurs enabling them to take advantage of market and technological opportunities leading to innovations (iii) by students helping them to capture and develop business ideas. In long-term the project’s output should create impact through: (iv) increasing synergies among educational offers in academia and business; (v) extending interdisciplinarity for higher educational offers by addressing convergence of Futures Studies and other academic disciplines; (vi) laying foundations to transform organisations into anticipatory and adaptive systems.

The project started with a state-of-the-art analysis and a pan-European survey to identify specific needs of the three target groups. With this foundation the online offer was setup in a flexible course structure including a basic course offer and three advanced modules respectively targeting students, entrepreneurs and academics. The developed e-learning courses were tested among target groups in national pilots in the project countries. The open access material was well received by students, entrepreneurs, and academics alike.

The beFORE consortium wants to thank everyone who supported the project and is continuing to do so. We welcome anyone interested to visit the e-learning platform prototype and to try out the educational offers: http://futureoriented.eu/foresight-course/

 

For the latest news on the beFORE project and to sign up for our newsletters (bottom of the page) please go here: http://futureoriented.eu/blog/