The network project BEPART worked towards more effective entrepreneurship promotion:

• Entrepreneurship training and education (towards higher quality, professionalism and regional impact).
• Regional development (towards sustainable combinations between entrepreneurship promotion and regional development).
  

Partners of BEPART are universities and incubator organisations in the Baltic Sea Area. The partner-units understand themselves as competence centres for entrepreneurship promotion and have respectively strong links to other regional key players in the field (business, education, administration and politics).
The network project took off in autumn 2004, founded by 12 partners from 8 countries. Openness for cooperation in the field is a carrying project idea: be part! Finally BEPART aimed to contributing to a vivid, competitive entrepreneurial culture in Europe. The international network cooperation and exchange, research and development of the project help to make regional and local efforts more effective.

The activities of the project work (2004 - 2007) were organized within 5 working components.

 

Entrepreneurship promotion, education and training, regional development or international/ interregional cooperation are above all a qualitative challenge.

The idea of BEPART is not to add just another project but to inspire the overall discussion of generating more quality. To do a “good practice”, to work towards higher quality is certainly a challenge for all initiatives into entrepreneurship promotion, regional development, and international cooperation. It is especially important for universities or colleges and their cooperation partners as “high-quality-institutions” if they aim to constantly improve their competitiveness within a knowledge-society.

But still to often quantitative criteria prevail at the expense of qualitative criteria.
Example 1: An entrepreneurship promotion programme which attracts many participants in simply a day may show quantitative high results if measured against the number of participants. But what about real learning-effects?
Example 2: Let us compare two imaginative programmes for student-entrepreneurs. One programme may luckily attract a student who creates a high-tech and fast-growing start-up company. The other programme may have attracted many students from different fields, inspired them with entrepreneurship, but the output of start ups are all low-tech. Which programme produced better quality or which is more succesful?
Example 3: Three universities from different countries successfully launched an international study course for entrepreneurship. Suddenly they get more aware of a lack of experienced teaching staff in entrepreneurship. How to solve that quality-bottleneck?

The quest for more quality is intriguing and promises to add value for quite a lot initiatives and projects far beyond the BEPART programme. This constituted a main focus of BEPART objectives which were approached within five components.