BEPART is a network project and is working 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 are working 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 aims to contribute to a vivid, competitive entrepreneurial culture in Europe. The international network cooperation and exchange, research and development of the project help us to make regional and local efforts more effective.

The activities of the network are organized within 5 working components.

 

Today, entrepreneurship promotion, education and training, regional development or international and 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 want to grow in their competitiveness within a knowledge-society.

But compared to that, the matter of improving quality still appears relatively seldom on the agendas in our fields of action. Often, progress is being measured against quantitative milestones and criteria only, and quality is assumed if some quantity is being achieved.
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: Two neighboured programmes for student-entrepreneurs, let them be named as A and B. By a lucky chance a student who later creates a high-tech and fast-growing start-up participated some days in programme A. Programme B attracts many students from different fields, inspires them with entrepreneurship, but the output of start ups are all low-tech. Which programme produced better quality?
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?

Quality and quantity shall not be opposed, but 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 constitutes a main focus of BEPART objectives which we are working in within five components.