NOBALIS Entrepreneurial and Innovation capacity development (EICD) programme for food, biotechnology and bioresource start-ups

Background

One of the key aspects of NOBALIS is to build up institutional capacity to support the entrepreneurship and innovation activities, while also providing start- and scale-up opportunities to students, academic staff and non-academic staff and taking those lessons for further improvement of practices.

EICD is a joint program for NOBALIS HEIs to enhance mutual learning and synergies. The goal of the program is to support the development of the initial ideas of participants related to new products/services in these fields towards valid business models.

The main goals are to:

  • support the development of the initial ideas of students related to new products/services in the focus fields towards valid business models (student track);
  • increase the capacities of staff (academic and non-academic) related to innovation management with the help of experienced mentors, and facilitate exchange of related best practices (staff track);
  • facilitate student-staff collaboration in innovation activities and provide focused support on student-staff teams (staff members are asked to propose their own ideas/ challenges that students can connect with, so that student-staff teams are formulated);
  • support existing start-ups linked with the participating HEIs’ ecosystems via focused 1:1 mentoring by leading experts (researchers, industry representatives).

Programme in details