This action shall provide specialized consulting services addressing innovation management capacity to SMEs with significant innovation activities. Beneficiaries of the SME instrument will receive support to enhance their innovation management and advice about the coaching process. The most innovative SME within the regions of Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla y León and Galicia will receive and advanced innovation assessment based on the Improve tool and an action plan to fulffill the gaps.

This action shall provide specialized consulting services addressing innovation management capacity to SMEs with significant innovation activities. Beneficiaries of the Accelerator Pilot and EIC Pilot will receive support to enhance their innovation management and advice about the coaching process. The most innovative SME within the regions of Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla y León and Galicia will receive and advanced innovation assessment based on the Improve tool and an action plan to fulffill the gaps.

This action shall provide specialized consulting services addressing innovation management capacity to SMEs with significant innovation activities. Beneficiaries of the SME instrument will receive support to enhance their innovation management and advice about the coaching process. The most innovative SME within the regions of Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla y León and Galicia will receive and advanced innovation assessment based on the Improve tool and an action plan to fulffill the gaps.

BLUES project was designed for a macroeconomic context of increasing inequality between different EU countries and regions, with Southern Europe suffering from high youth unemployment rates, including university graduates, and serious public funding constraints. In this context, HEI are increasingly being judged by the ways in which they respond to the social and economic needs of society, their actions to enhance graduate employability, their contributions to national economic growth and local development and the ways in which they stimulate the birth of new enterprises and innovation in existing firms. BLUES project considers that HEI can respond to these challenges by promoting students entrepreneurial mind-set and transversal key skills in order to increase their employability and contribute to economic growth. Southern Europe’s HEI need innovative low-cost methodologies and educational models such as the ones designed by BLUES to improve the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in terms of skills acquisition and development.BLUES project seeked to contribute to higher effectiveness, relevance and quality of students skills and HEI education through the conception, design, validation and dissemination of a pioneer model of an international blended-learning entrepreneurship education methodology that takes advantage of the benefits of face-to-face and digitial education to increase the effectiveness and quality of learning outcomes; and through the conception, design, production and dissemination of high-quality digital and face-to-face educational resources and tools that would be replicable, editable and adaptable as an open educative resource for every European institution interested in its use. All this, also aiming to contribute to the reduce of youth unemployment in Europe, specialy in southern European countries.BLUES consortium comprised 5 EU HEIs, 1 Scientific and Technology Park, 1 International Entrepreneurship Center, 1 Regional Business Association and 2 Chambers of Commerce from 5 EU countries (Finland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Slovenia).The active engagement of business representatives with HEIs in the project was designed for ensuring that the BLUES methodology and outputs responded to employers and entrepreneurs needs with regards to the skills that they expect from their future employees or peers.Participants of the different project activities included, among others, 106 students from different degrees of University Cantabria (UC), University NOVA Lisbon (UNL), University Perugia (UP) and University Ljubljana (UL) that participated in the 5 pilot courses based on BLUES blended-learning methodology; 1,239 persons that participated in the BLUES MOOC’s first edition; BLUES also had the participation of 54 HEI lecturers together with researchers and decision-makers as well as business people and entrepreneurs from Cantabria, Lisbon, Perugia and Ljubljana in the different project activities. In addition, the project included an external Advisory Board comprised of 7 internationally renowned entrepreneurship and business experts that revised and validated the project activities and results. Also, 835 youth entrepreneurs from Europe and Latin America and 235 Erasmus students had the opportunity to learn about BLUES project, its objectives and results during differnte events; Finaly, 349 national and international key stakeholders (119 of them via streaming) participated in the BLUES national and international dissemination events.BLUES activities included the design of an adaptable, transversal, scalable and replicable blended-learning entrepreneurship education methodology that provides HEIs with a complete learning context to develop students’ entrepreneurial mind-set and key transversal skills required by the labour market and for successful entrepreneurial initiatives; and the conception and design of innovative digital and face-to-face training resources and tools that are available for download as an open educative resource at BLUES webpage. The project conducted 5 pilot courses based on BLUES methodology in 4 HEIs in order to validate the methodology as well as to test its effectiveness and replicability, and launched a wide range of dissemination activities such as the organisation of 1 international conference and 3 national events. BLUES also celebrated 5 transnational project meetings, 2 short-term joint staff training activities and 1 validation workshop.BLUES project implementation led to the production of the above mentioned resources, that contributes to increase students entrepreneurial mind-set and skills, and to improve their possibilities of employability. BLUES also collaborated to strenghten university-business cooperation, increasing awareness and providing with innovative methodologies and tools that can be easily scaled, replicated and adapted to the particular needs and context of local environments using innovation and focusing as well in social impact.

This action shall provide specialized consulting services addressing innovation management capacity to SMEs with significant innovation activities. Beneficiaries of the SME instrument will receive support to enhance their innovation management and advice about the coaching process. The most innovative SME within the regions of Asturias, Cantabria, Castilla y León and Galicia will receive and advanced innovation assessment based on the Improve tool and an action plan to fulffill the gaps.