Activites
Below you will find the activities that was a direct result of the project efforts.
The activities highligted are the start up programme Ignite, Access to facilities and different events offered throughout the project.
Ignite
Ignite is Nordic Entrepreneurship Hub’s startup programme for students who want to develop their idea into a business, train their entrepreneurial mindset and become part of a strong community of startups.
As part of Ignite you will get access to free startup coaching and all the know-how, resources and workshops imaginable. All you have to do is commit to working seriously with your idea and be open to question your assumptions.
Through eight workshops you will meet and interact with the other participating startups and dive into core topics – each workshop creates input for one slide in your pitch deck or a tool from the toolbox.
The Ignite programme is offered at KEA - Copenhagen School of Design & Technology, Skylab @DTU - Technical University of Denmark and VentureLab @ LU - Lund University.
Ignite starts in the beginning of each semester and runs over an approximately 3-month period as an extra curricular programme.
Upon completion of the course you will receive a diploma for future references.
DISCLAIMER:
NEH has ended thus the ignite programmes are not active within the NEH project but are still active at each partner institution - please find more info at the individual partner institution's webpages.
Plug & Play
Being an Ignitee allows you to plug & play among the different Ignite workshops across the three institutions. So if you are enrolled at VentureLab’s Ignite programme and have a workshop about funding, but rather want to join the prototyping-workshop at SkyLab or vice versa, you are free to do so.
How: Check each institution’s Ignite programme here on the site for availability and announce your attendance to the local startup coach at the institution you wish to visit.
We will reimburse travel cost upon display of original train tickets to your local Ignite-startup team.
KRISTOFFER BUCH
DTU Skylab Ignite
Startup Coach
Access
KEA
About
Contact
Facilities
VentureLab
About
VentureLab is Lund University's
collaborative space designed to stimulate
entrepreneurship and to support students and graduates who want to start their own businesses.
Since its inception in 2001 VentureLab has expanded and been embraced by LU Innovation, the university´s link between academia and business. With headquarters at the Innovation hub Ideon Agora, in Lund, VentureLab meet more than 5000 students each year on our inspirational activities, receive more than 200 student ideas through idea & business meetings and provide a "home" for 40 to 50 companies each year in our incubator.
Cphbusiness – Inkubatoren
About
INKUBATOREN at Cphbusiness is living and breathing the motto: ‘Grow your own business while studying’.
We support our student startups in hitting reality as fast as possible: Real prototyping – real customers – real money.
This reality focus makes the work and the knowledge sharing between the startups in inkubatoren very intense and profound. There’s a lot at stake. It’s a community of give and take. Results are hard work and high growth rates.
To us, entrepreneurship is the mindset, more than the initial idea. We spot and nuture entrepreneurial talents with a focus on three strengths: Creative, innovative and entrepreneurial.
If you are serious about your entrepreneurial journey, as a student of a NEH member institution, you are welcome to join our community network
Facilities
Contact
3D Printing Laboratory
Workshops
Incubator with
25 workspaces
Meeting rooms
Business advice
VentureLab labs and workspaces are placed around at Lund University different departments.
To find each facility’s address and opening hours, follow the links above.
For further information about VentureLab facilities see here
Facilities
Contact
DTU SkyLab
About
Skylab is one huge castle for innovation and
co-creation. Their prototyping workshops cover everything from wood workshop, laboratory, electronics and rapid prototyping studio as well as a pretotyping area. The equipment varies
from 3D printers, Arduino kits, plasma and laser cutters, CNC machines all the way to a robot arm and much more.
In the workshops, Skylab’s staff are ready to help you build prototypes and they will assist you in operating the equipment.
The large open work area can be used for exhibitions, events and study. Just pick a seat and turn on your computer. Go to the social lounge area for a break, where you can test your X-box gaming skills or just relax with a cup of coffee.
You also have access to group- and meeting rooms where you can have great brainstorm sessions writing on the walls or roll down the curtains for exam sessions. For smaller courses or workshops our 60 m2 beautiful, free-flowing Skybox can fit up to 30 people.
Facilities
Contact
The workshops are open as follows:
Monday: 8.00-15.15
Tuesday: 8.00-15.15
Wednesday: 8.00-16.45
Thursday:8.00-15.15
Friday: 8.00-15.15
The objective of KEA - Copenhagen School of Design and Technology - is to develop and offer business-oriented higher education that combines theory with practice. Or as KEA’s slogan says: knowledge alone is not enough -
you need skills. In line with this practical focus KEA has a number of labs that hold 3D printers, laser cutters, robots, VR equipment, and much more for you to develop your skills.
KEA’s labs and workspaces are placed around at KEA’s different departments. To find each facility’s address and opening hours, follow the links above.
For further information about KEA’s facilities see here
MakerLab
Material Design Lab
Wearables Lab
Tech Lounge
VDC
Incubator with 20
work spaces
Lounge and open work area
Workstations
Inkubatoren at Cphbusiness is located at two addresses:
Inkubatoren Lyngby,
Nørgaardsvej 30,
2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Inkubatoren Søerne,
Nansensgade 19,
1366 København K
For further information about Inkubatoren facilities see here
Fill out the contact form here:
Events
Believe in your ideas
Believe In Your Ideas’ overall focus is on creating an open and positive space for sharing
entrepreneurship experiences, questions, advice and tools, while at the same time
boosting the women's confidence and entrepreneurial mindset
Believe In Your Ideas is an early stage startup event for women studying at higher education institutions. The intense two-day course is held over a weekend and full of inspirational talks,
workshops and idea generation, that aim to give the participants the push they need to explore entrepreneurship further.
It’s also a platform for women with different backgrounds and interests to meet and create a network they can continue to build on after the event. We believe community and network is crucial for a young entrepreneur. Sharing ideas and experiences with like-minded people can both contribute to innovation and development, as well as provide the guidance and support the entrepreneur needs to take important decisions and move forward.
Target group
The event is aimed at students who have an idea, but who are not sure whether to - or how to -move forward with it, as well as those students who doesn’t have a specific idea, but are interested in entrepreneurship. It thus differs from many other entrepreneurship initiatives by not requiring a concrete idea or business. Those students who already have started their own business and made the first prototypes or sales, are also welcome to apply, but our experience is that they often already believe in their ideas and to a greater extent are looking for concrete advise on e.g. funding, and therefore the event doesn’t meet their needs and expectations.
All of NEH’s partners have a broad range of entrepreneurship programmes, events and incubation possibilities more suited for those students at a later startup stage such as Ignite, which can be recommended instead.
All these other entrepreneurship activities are open for all students and have been for several years without any positive change to the unequal gender distribution within entrepreneurship.
Therefore NEH chose to try our hand at this single one event targeted at students who identify as women in order to explore whether separatist activities could be a way to increase diversity and equality in the long run.
We don’t have the answers at this point and more research into the impact of gender-specific entrepreneurial initiatives like Believe In Your Ideas is called for. What we can see, is Believe In
Your Ideas popularity among the students across the border. The high number of applicants, the request for more similar initiatives and the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the participants of the event, have convinced us of it's value.
BACKGROUND
Believe In Your Ideas has been arranged by Lund University’s startup hub VentureLab since 2005 with the aim to inspire women students to see entrepreneurship as an alternative career path. For a long time women have been underrepresented in entrepreneurship as well as at the
universities’ startup hubs. VentureLab wanted to change that, which is how the event came to life.
Both Denmark and Sweden have some of the worlds highest number of women active in the labour market and level of gender equality, but when it comes to entrepreneurship, Sweden and Denmark are those countries in Europe with the lowest share of self-employed women (OECD,
2016).
According to Iværksætterbarometer 2019, an annual Danish publication about the pulse of entrepreneurship, new figures from Denmark's Statistics show that only one in four entrepreneurs are women and there hasn’t been any significant growth in the number of women entrepreneurs over the past decade (Iværksætterbarometer, 2019). The same picture can be seen in Sweden, where the percentage of women entrepreneurs even has been declining. Between 2017 and 2018 the share fell by almost two percentage points or 30%, so women entrepreneurs today only account for 4% of Sweden’s total active labour force (GEM, 2018).
This occurrent gender gap in entrepreneurship is the basis for Nordic Entrepreneurship Hub's horizontal criterion and focus on ‘Gender equality’ and a long-term goal of an increased share of
women entrepreneurs in the Øresund Region. In the short term, Nordic Entrepreneurship Hubs (NEH) is working to increase the proportion of women who start a business in the partner
institutions' entrepreneurial and incubation environments.
27 women from Lund University, KEA and DTU first met for Believe In Your Ideas in Falsterbo, Sweden in the autumn of 2018. Students not only from different faculties, but different schools and countries gave an amazing synergy and the feedback from the students were so positive, that it shortly afterwards was decided to hold another joint event. The second NEH Believe In Your Ideas were held in June 2019 and established the course’s value as well as its potential to be further developed and disseminated through a publication.
‘Believe In Your Ideas’ is not only the title, but also the goal of the event. And according to the evaluations, it’s also what we have accomplished with the two joint NEH-Believe In Your Ideas
events, where 87,2% of the participants afterwards want to work with their idea, while the remaining 12,8% said ‘maybe’; which means that no woman has ever left Believe In Your Ideas
feeling like entrepreneurship is not something for her. The events’ success is further determined by the 93,4% of all participants who thought the overall event were ‘good’ and the majority even rated it as ‘amazing’.
PARTICIPATION
In order to find the best suited participants, we have chosen to make an application form which include a question about personal motivation for participating. Approximately a month before an upcoming event, the application form and information about the event is shared on the institutions’ communication platforms as well as the facebook event-page created for the occasion.
Any upcoming events in the Nordic Entrepreneurship Hub will also be posted on this site. After the application deadline all applicants are emailed whether or not they have been chosen to participate, and the ones who got a spot additionally receive an information letter about the weekend.
KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND COLLABORATION
We have created an e-book about Believe In Your Ideas - the concept, background, framework and exercises. The hope is that the publication will act as an inspirational guide for other actors who work with entrepreneurship in an educational setting to have similar events or develop their own initiative towards getting more women students to believe in their business ideas.
Believe In Your Ideas has changed through the years and we still don’t have all the answers. But by sharing our experiences and knowledge, we hope to learn from each other and contribute to more gender equality among entrepreneurs in the future. When using the Believe In Your Ideas concept and/or its materials, please use our name, logo (which can be downloaded here) and the hashtag #BelieveInYourIdeas
You are always welcome to contact the Nordic Entrepreneurship Hubs project team as well asVentureLab by Lund University at:
www.venturelab.lu.se/contact or by phone at +46(0)46-222-26247