Digital Simulator for Entrepreneurial Finance
FINANCEn_LAB
Call 2020 Round 1 KA2 – Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices
KA226 – Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness
Project title: Digital Simulator for Entrepreneurial Finance
Project number: 2020-1-ES01-KA226-HE-095810
Acronym: FINANCEn_LAB
Total duration: 24 months
Project start and end dates: 01.03.2021 – 28.02.2023
Website:
Partner Organisations:
- FUNIBER Fundación Universitaria Iberoamericana, Santander, Spain – applicant
- Jan Kochanowski University of Kielce (UJK), Poland
- Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iași, Romania
- tvw GmbH, Germany
- Fundación Centro de Investigación y Tecnología Industrial de Cantabria, Spain
- Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
Total funding: 287 945,00 EUR
UJK project team
dr Ana Kaminska – scientific expert, researcher and project team leader
Faculty of Law and Social Sciences
e-mail: ana.kaminska@ujk.edu.pl
tel. 41 349 66 35
dr Joanna Rudawska – scientific expert, researcher
Faculty of Law and Social Sciences
e-mail: joanna.rudawska@ujk.edu.pl
Beata Banach-Rząca – contact person, administrative support
International Relations Office
e-mail: bbanach@ujk.edu.pl,
tel. 41 349 72 67
The general idea of FINANCEn_LAB is to foster entrepreneurship among HE/VET/adult students through increased finance practical training in the context of entrepreneurship, financial/funding barriers and European strategy. Entrepreneurship has proved to be an important contributor to the economic development of the nations. The rising complexity of the financial system and the great proportion of the European population, who is still financially illiterate, implies lack of understanding of necessary financial concepts. It also prevents many entrepreneurs from designing and applying effectively for funding and difficulties of management their financial situations or being proactive with their finances. Entrepreneurship and financial literacy education sits at the heart of any entrepreneurial ecosystem for Europe. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic limited the delivery of face-to-face education and had a very significant impact on practical training.
The project implies cooperation of different type of organizations. The HE institutions and banking/financial sector will collaborate closely to ensure that we use appropriate content. Entrepreneurial institutions will support the outputs creation, attracting the attention of practitioners and professionals in the entrepreneurial field. It is of special interest to raise awareness on the different alternative sources of funding besides the traditional bank loans, such as crowdfunding, business angels, capital ventures and offer current and future entrepreneurs practical training since it will also generate significant impact measured over time.
Objectives
Digital Simulator for Entrepreneurial Finance (FINANCEn_LAB) project contributes to the improvement in financial literacy, especially, among HE students, as potential entrepreneurs, through an effective method of learning by doing. The project aims at covering the gap of practical financial competences considered as a critical barrier for entrepreneurship. Possible solution goes through cooperation between financing actors and educational sector. Thus, common training will be complemented with real practice, which includes individual and collaborative work, very different from traditional school assignments, since it will inter-connect funding agents such as banking professionals, investors, mentors with entrepreneurs and students.
General objective of FINANCEn_LAB is to offer efficient tools that contribute to and enrich entrepreneurship education through effective financial literacy and decision making in quasi-real scenarios. Specific objectives of the Digital Simulator for Entrepreneurial Finance project comprise:
- creating practical cases for training around the most critical financial skills for entrepreneurs, such as budgeting, liquidity management, funding and investment
- training strategic decision making in finances and investment considering a global vision of a business and support participants’ progress towards meeting their goals related to financial scenarios
- increasing collaborative learning with banking and funding entities
- providing sound base for mutual improved understanding between entrepreneurs and banking/financial entities in order to reduce tensions between them.
Description of activities
The main project activities are oriented to the production of four intellectual outputs:
- Practical cases in entrepreneurial finance for training purposes.
- Digital Simulator for entrepreneurial finance – trainer’s tool.
- Digital Simulator for entrepreneurial finance – self-learning tool.
- Report on recommendations for entrepreneurial finance stakeholders and policy makers
Target groups
- university students as potential entrepreneurs
- entrepreneurs
- banking professionals, business angels, private investors and other financing actors
- Higher Education teachers
- entrepreneurial trainers/mentors.
- spin-off entrepreneurial coachers.
- Higher Education board members.
- entrepreneurial policymakers/public administrations
The project will reach the following segments of people: university students, entrepreneurs, teachers, start-up incubators, financial agents for an estimated total of 840 direct participants and 14 600 additional reached online.
The FINANCEn_LAB project has identified four innovations in the current HE level for entrepreneurial finance:
- To extend access to entrepreneurial financial education.
The project aims at introducing entrepreneurial financial education for students that currently do not receive this education.
- Social learning involving interactions with financial entities or private investors.
The project will develop an innovative trainer’s tool that will be using a social learning approach into a digital simulator. This tool, oriented to enhance the practical learning will include real-world simulated experiences with interaction of learners (potential entrepreneurs) with financial agents.
- Artificial Intelligence to learn from the generated interactions.
Considering the amount of data (anonymized) to be captured in the interactions of the learners with financial agents, it is planned to get profit of AI as a valuable technique for some of the next uses: detection of users patterns, self-adaptation of some learning objects. Another opportunity for AI application is the self-adaptation of some learning objects/items.
- A set of recommendations, based on robust data, to main stakeholders and policy makers aimed at facilitating entrepreneurs access to funding.
The main element of innovation is generation of the knowledge on financial behaviour of entrepreneurs and their interactions with financial agents. It will serve as a robust base for empirical research and generation of specific reports.