The BIOHEALTH Gear Box Alliance project (BIO–ALL), funded by the Erasmus+ Programme, intends to develop new, innovative and multidisciplinary approaches to teach and learn entrepreneurial skills and competences, stimulating entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills of higher education teaching staff and business staff (professionals) and easing the exchange, flow and co-creation of educational assets and knowledge.
BIO-ALL aims to stimulate co-creation, open innovation and collaborative dynamics between and within relevant actors of the Biotech and Health (BIOHEALTH) ecosystem, such as Academia (including Higher Education Institutions - HEIs, staff and students), Business/Industry, Incubators/Accelerators and investors and other relevant stakeholders.
Indeed, in BIOHEALTH industry there is still a need to address specific entrepreneurial and acceleration programs as well as there is a request of multidisciplinary human resources, with technical but also t-shaped skills and entrepreneurial mind-sets. This leads to a necessity of a closer and stronger relationship between Academia (HEIs) and Industry, in both ways commercially and educationally. In such context schools and educational institutions must re-think the set of competences and knowledge their students and staff need to succeed.
The BIOHEALTH sector joins all the science areas that contribute to a new healthcare ecosystem and is an aggregator of several BIO-related areas, including biotechnology, medicine, ICT, pharmaceutical industry, medical devices, chemistry, etc.
Project ambition is to accelerate knowledge and competences to boost efficient innovation and entrepreneurial processes in the BIOHEALTH sector, fostering collaborative dynamics between relevant actors of the ecosystem. The purpose will be achieved by the development of new education assets, methodologies and schemes in order to step up the responsiveness of the HEI’s education supply in supporting entrepreneurship in the BIOHEALTH sector.
Activities
The project will play a key role in the BIOHEALTH sector in creation of instruments for developing entrepreneurial skills that are currently not effectively structured and implanted into the education curricula offers of schools and universities. In order to respond to this need , the project aims to develop transnational solutions composed by five main components:
- BIOHEALTH Gear Box Blueprint – development of a BIOHEALTH roadmap together with key actors and end-users;
- BIOHEALTH Gear Box Engagement Events – such as “Unconferences”, “Sparkathons” and “BIOHEALTH Gear Box Labs” to support and encourage collaboration opportunities between Academia, Business and Incubators/Accelerators;
- International Joint Post-Graduation Programme developed in collaboration with the end-users. The organization of this course will be preceded by a staff’ Capacitation Programme (Train-the-Trainer course), which will involve staff mobility;
- International Joint Acceleration Programme – development and implementation of a groundbreaking International Acceleration Programme built-on 360° logic, integrated and tailor-made, in which beneficiaries (seed-companies) will have access to a wide fan of technical and practical business support activities;
- BIOHEALTH Gear Box Hub – creation of a collaborative online hub with the aim of fostering open innovation dynamics and co-creation processes, specially between the University and Business/Industry
Partners
- University of Beira Interior, Portugal
- University of Granada, Spain
- Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
- Interuniversitary Consortium “National Institute of Biostructures and Biosystems”, Italy
- HPRD – Health Products Research and Development Lda, PortugalSave
- Asociación Clúster Granada Plaza Tecnológica y Biotecnológica, On Granada Tech City, Spain
- Centro Europeo de Empresas e Innovación de Aragón, Spain
- Friuli Innovazione – Research and Technological transfer centre, Italy
- Building Global Innovators, Portugal
- Fundación Parque Tecnológico de Ciencias de la Salud de Granada, Spain
- Cube Labs s.r.l., Italy
- Virtual Angle BV, The Netherlands
- INOVA+ - Innovation Services SA, Portugal
Project duration: January 2019 - December 2021