Promotion of technology-based innovation and entrepreneurship.

Loun, Kaia ; Otto, Tauno ; Riives, Jyri 等

1. INTRODUCTION

A range of policy strategies and action plans have identified that Europe needs more entrepreneurs and more entrepreneurial organisations. Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behaviour are currently seen as major drivers of innovation, competitiveness and growth, as sources of jobs for the European economy and, at the same time, as interesting possibilities for individual development, fulfilment and citizenship. Education has a major role in promoting entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours in people from all ages. Within higher education, combining entrepreneurial mindsets and competence with excellence in scientific and technical studies should enable students and researchers to better commercialize their ideas and new technologies developed, and increase the likelihood of success of academic spin-offs, increasingly seen as important means of enhancing local economic development. Even if this is not the case, encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour will produce more motivated, innovative and independent employees.

Several proposals for modifying elements of the Estonian innovation system to facilitate linkages between universities, industry and government have been made. The linear innovation model needs to be replaced with a balanced interaction-based approach. To discriminate against low-tech industries by allocating the majority of resources to the creation of a high-tech sector is not an appropriate policy. Much more attention should be given to the systemic development of the absorption and diffusion of knowledge produced outside and inside catching-up economies. The lack of managerial and organizational skills is a very important barrier to innovation and should not be overlooked (Varblane et al., 2008).

2008-2009 we participated in Inter-Countries Research for Manufacturing Advancement (IRMA) in the 27 European Union's states. The survey involved three interfaces: enterprises, universities and "intermediary" institutions (incubators, technological poles, academic spin-off, institutional agencies). Fig. 1 shows, that over 70% of companies agree with necessity for involving the universities also into programs for supporting the start-up business or for enhancement of the one that is already running.

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Universities themselves are obviously working right, but they need to become more involved into life of enterprises in order to provide students with more innovative system of educational process (Novak-Marcincin & Janak, 2009). For example, in Korea there has been found manufacturing competitiveness improvement achieved satisfactory results through informatization innovation and IT technology integration targeting small and medium manufacturing enterprises through the e-Manufacturing project, and it becomes necessary to expand the success cases of collaboration as well as the strategic implementation models by industry and by region continuously (Lee et al., 2008).

Main problems from the companies' viewpoint from the survey of the Estonian mechanical engineering companies were as follows (Loun et al., 2008): A: General problems (more than 75% of respondents)

* Lack of qualified workers

* Obsolescence of equipment

B: realization problems (ca 50% of respondents)

* Lack of mid-level managers

* Lack of investment capital

* Quality assurance problems

* Lack of information about technological capabilities and possibilities

Therefore a new concept was needed for promoting entreprenurship and innovation in universities of technology. A concortium including Portugal, Greece, Romania and Estonia started a project PREMIO (http://www.premio-project.eu) targeted to elaboration of concurrent e-learning model, which should incorporate technology parks and mentoring by experienced mentors from existing successful enterprises.

2. DESIGN OF MULTICULTURAL CONCURRENT MODEL

Research was addressed to developing model for multicultural promotion of new entrepreneurs for scientific or technological projects. Promoter of this project is Maia Science and Technology Park Tecmaia. In parallel, the following topics on personal and professional skills were addressed (Fig. 2).

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The academic plan of studies is specialised for training in subjects like the Company, Business Plan, Innovation, Financing, Marketing and Copyright, Internationalization and Project Management. By adapting of a culture of entrepreneurship at the University level and its main actors (students, professors, and researchers) it enables to overpass the actual difficulties and limitations. Intercultural courses are successful if problem-based learning is integrated with practice in real organisations (Saatci, 2008). With the current research we aimed to go a step further and aimed the students to establish own organisations capable for global competition.

In a first approach were developed practical tools and methodologies to implement the e-course in multiple languages and for different economic/cultural environments. The multicultural e-learning enables creating and testing the feasibility of a global business opportunity, by engaging in an entrepreneurial experience. In general it will provide a holistic approach to the entrepreneurial process, leading the multicultural e-course participants from concept creation to business plan development, and addressing issues such as innovation and project management, marketing, financing and intellectual property. Even if the e-tutors are by no means expected to become experts in each one of these areas, the aim was to support the business ideas suggested by them, while making the business plans more robust as they become aware of key issues that new managers must consider.

3. IMPLEMENTATION OF E-LEARNING MODULES

PREMIO fills the blank spot for the platform users where traditionally investments in education and training are few, where traditionally no flexible entrepreneurial learning approaches are present. In reaching the lifelong learner, conventional universities may especially benefit from the transfer of pedagogically-rich learning styles, from distance education, having the potential to contribute to private sector development, especially the SMEs sector (Gillich et al., 2009).

In view of the expected programme outcomes, the following programme flow was adopted, corresponding to an intuitive and natural approach: context, application, implementation and assessment. Each of these phases deals with topics on management and technology.

4. CONCLUSION

Encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour will produce more motivated, innovative and independent employees. Use of web based skills analysis, e-learning and involvement of technological parks helps new entrepreneurs to start their business.

The proposed methodology is based on a blended-learning approach that combines face-to-face classroom instruction with life online learning and self-paced learning, resulting in reduced classroom contact hours (reduced seat time). This instructional model merges the effectiveness and socialization opportunities of the classroom with the technological enhanced active learning possibilities of the online environment, including collaborative learning among learners, knowledge sharing and consistent delivery of information, as each trainee is given exactly the same contents as their colleagues. According the web based analysis new tailor made courses can be developed. The target on professional/personal development implies that the training process focuses on methodologies that emphasize more the processes than the contents; student-centred instruction, in which students become active and interactive learners, being held directly responsible for training outcomes; interaction between student-instructor, student-student, student-content, and student-outside resources. Elaborated educational model is realised in four countries as a concurrent e-course in Moodle environment (http://course.premio-project.eu), available besides English also in native languages.

After the training course altogether 33 business plans were selected for individual virtual incubation. In an interesting way the promotion of such technological entrepreneurship approach encouraged also trainers. From the project has grown up company IMECC, promoted by trainers and mentors of the project, targeted to improve the competitiveness of Estonian engineering industry based on increasing industrial use of new technologies of optimal PLM (product life-cycle management) and e-Manufacturing. The business plan developed was successful in gaining national support as is based upon emerging manufacturing technologies and process automation techniques, and new forms of self-organizing systems with online monitoring and diagnostics in order to gain competitive advantages and assure economic success in a global economy, to rise the effective use of knowledge in product engineering and manufacturing planning for small series production in distributed and networked organizations of Estonian engineering industry.

Productivity and speeding up innovation process are essential in terms of company's continuous sustainability and competitiveness. Innovative development of the company is complex activity. IMECC responds to the standpoints of Estonian research and development activities and innovation strategy 2007-2013 "Knowledge-based Estonia".

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The referred project PREMIO has been funded with support from the European Commission.

6. REFERENCES

Gillich, G.R.; Amariei, D.; Gillich, N. & Amariei, O.I. (2009). Some contributions to the development of education projects in European area, Procedia Social Sciences, Vol 1, No 1

Loun, K.; Riives, J.; Kyttner, R.; Otto, T.; Hobemagi, A.; Lelumees, T. & Halling, J. (2008). Engineering Enterprises Survey Report, Available from: http://innomet.ttu.ee/ materjalid/innomet_raport.pdf, Accessed: 2009-07-05

Lee, S.-W.; Ryu, K.-Y.; Nam, S.-H.; Choi, Y.-S. & Choi, H.-Z., (2008). i-Manufacturing: Korean-style Manufacturing Innovation Strategy Promoting Balanced Regional Growth Based on Collaboration, Smart Manufacturing Application, ICSMA, pp 58-66

Novak-Marcincin, J. & Janak, M. (2009) IRMA Research Analysis, Available from: http://www.irmaproject.eu/ result.htm, Accessed: 2009-09-06

Saatci, E. (2008). Problem-based Learning in an Intercultural Business Communication Course,. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Vol 22, No 2, pp 237-260.

Varblane, U.; Mets, T. & Ukrainski, K. (2008). Role of university-industry-government linkages in the innovation processes of a small catching-up economy, Industry & Higher Education, Vol 22, No 6, pp 373-386