Teaching Entrepreneurship Advancing the Maritime Sector

ended

The TEAMS project addresses acceleration of innovation in the maritime sector by fostering design thinking and entrepreneurship with 60 students in maritime education, incorporating relevant 21st-century skills in existing curricula. It also creates a structured, permanent collaboration framework on innovation between maritime industry and education. A gap analysis of 21st-century skills in the maritime educational offer is made, highlighting the correlation between existing learning goals and entrepreneurial and design thinking competencies in educational offer in three North-sea basin countries. Also, a Blueprint is made, based on entrepreneurship teaching principles that offers and fosters this design thinking and entrepreneurship. 10 Lecturers are trained to become TEAMS Coach, expanding their expertise to be able to train 60 students sustainably to become Teampreneurs. A TEAMS Blueprint is executed in the involved colleges. Finally, the project disseminates and promotes the TEAMS concept by a sustainable platform with active involvement of the maritime industry and maritime education. The platform presents the TEAM Blueprint, covers annual innovation contests, presents a TEAMS toolbox with course and assessment material for replication and adaptation by EU maritime educational institutions and aims to influence multilateral organisations to adopt changes in international agreements regarding 21st-century skills development. The University of Applied Sciences in Jyväskylä (Finland) will tailor-make this approach to be implemented in the curricula of the educational institutions of STC (Netherlands), the HZS (Belgium) and the NMCI (Ireland). The Trade Association Netherlands Maritime Technology and the Maritime start-up accelerator PortXL fulfil the role in establishing the linkage between (innovative) proposals by students, and maritime companies. Together they form a strong team introducing true entrepreneurship in maritime education.