Tackling the EIT Health and EIT Digital missions, TRUE’s mission is to eliminate the obstacles that inhibit innovation and entrepreneurship by strengthening links in the education knowledge triangle and by making training, tools and personalised support open and readily accessible to European citizens. The project expects to impact 4,000 European citizens during the funding period and up to 19,000 by 2030. This will be possible thanks to the boundless commitment of the TRUE partners who will inoculate universities with entrepreneurship and foster behavioural change by implementing tailor-made interventions.

In accordance with the 3B framework, the consortium will buffer support to early-stage entrepreneurial activities, bridge startups with external actors in the ecosystem, and boost support to accelerate promising businesses. As a result, a future generation of social innovators and entrepreneurs will generate life-changing solutions at all levels of society which will boost economic growth and competitiveness.

The consortium’s main objectives are to:

• make innovation and entrepreneurship policies part of daily routines and stable in the long term;
• broaden the scope of action and generate a large impact in higher education institution (HEI) communities;
• make education and training in innovation and entrepreneurship accessible to students and academic and non-academic staff;
• drive organisational change towards entrepreneurship through behavioural change;
• fill the gap between entrepreneurial actions, teaching and research in this field and generate metrics.

A different set of actions will be performed to fulfil the objectives. In summary, HEIs will:

• create and consolidate innovation, entrepreneurship and techtransfer support units, aiming to strengthen collaboration with external stakeholders and boost entrepreneurship to guarantee the continuity of IVAP beyond 2023;
• develop open-source digital tools to scale innovation and entrepreneurial knowledge and skills;
• introduce innovation and entrepreneurship courses to all degrees and update the curricula of existing courses;
• develop and implement programmes that will accelerate behavioural change towards a sustainable entrepreneurial mindset and skills expansion;
• map existing knowledge to pinpoint cross-fertilisation actions and generate metrics to analyse the impact of interventions performed and enhance research on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Finally, as previously deployed in several organisations, people analytics, using artificial intelligence, will be implemented at the beginning of the pilot project by Sapiens Mindset to assess the entrepreneurial mindsets of students, and academic and nonacademic staff. After one year of interventions, entrepreneurial mindset will be measured again to observe progress and adapt planned interventions.

Project coordinator

Claudio Cruz Cázares, Director StartUB!, University of Barcelona (contact)

Project website

heitrueproject.com