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Gamification as Applied Growth-Hacking and Incubating method for improving New Ground-Based Skills in Start-uppers and Enterprises
Start date: Oct 1, 2015, End date: Sep 30, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

‘No business is too big to fail or too small to be successful’. This Brian Solis’s sentence highlights the evolutionary process that makes obsolete and uncompetitive those businesses that are not able to grasp the change. Adaptive capacity becomes essential in the evolution of the businesses, especially for SMEs. Education and training are key drivers in the process of spreading a stronger culture of entrepreneurship in Europe. It is considered as having the potential to contribute to the building of entrepreneurial mindsets among the young citizens of Europe, to an increase in the rates of business start-up survival, as well as to more growth and innovation in SMEs, and hence to contribute to the growth of employment opportunities in the medium term. Nowadays, assistance to SMEs and start ups takes the form of traditional services such as coaching and financial support in the areas of law, marketing, accounting and intellectual property rights, provided free of charge of for a low fee within structures such as incubators. However, the traditional assistance lacks of skills and expertise in the new techniques and tactics aimed at deeply understanding both the needs of entrepreneurs and customers. This is why the project aimed at combining in an original way the gamification theory and the ‘growth hacking’ strategy. This innovative mix will allow to deliver new skills to business developers and coaches in assisting entrepreneurs, by offering both a more personalized assistance to be focused on the specific needs of each entrepreneur, and by helping them in ‘automating’ the generation of ideas according to the growth hacking strategy. Through the project, new skills will be delivered to 10 professionals for each partner, for a total of 80 gamehackers. Participants will be graduates, business developers, tutors at incubators and business accelerators. The new figure created will be a flexible, multi-tasking expert able to deeply understand the behavior, attitudes, thoughts and emotions of the entrepreneurs, and to assist him/her in the ruthless selection process of the ‘entrepreneurial Darwinism’ through unconventional activities based on game-play techniques such as strategy, goals, rules, scoring, levels etc. Successful gamification does not always depend on the complexity of the game play, but the key is forcing deeper connections with the players. Organization that have successful implemented gamification techniques design experiences that motivate and engage users to advance their personal and business goals. The project aim at creating a pilot transnational training course based on formal, informal and non-formal training (MOOC, live training, workshops etc.) to be replicated in the future through the involvement of business accelerators, business schools, research centres and public organizations in the field of entrepreneurship. The sharing of collected results in the testing phase will allow the creation of a high-standard competence profile through the definition of a quality standard to be fulfilled by all bodies aiming at becoming part of the network. Through the implementation of a virtual platform, the GAG-Platform, OER will be made available and the participants will be involved in 3 national meetings for each country, after the end of the project, in order to disseminate the project results. Furthermore, the construction of a Community of Practice for sharing innovative gamehaking capsules, both in the public and in the private sectors will be an asset assuring project sustainability and process innovation. The consortium comprises 8 international partners from Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Italy and Portugal having the expertise and know-how for building an European Network of business game-hackers. This international partnership will offer the proper framework for discussions, sharing of experiences, innovative practices and methodologies and also for development of results. The main results are the identification of emerging “hard” and Soft” skill set, related to the new challenges addressing the entrepreneurial coaching sector; to validate a cross-country and cross-sectorial methodology for participatory need analysis; to generate a permanent open repository for innovative self-training and self-assessment among gamification experts and entrepreneurial coaches; to test peer-to-peer training and skills evaluation by generating software-based tool; to create a unique competence profile for gamehackers; to create a Virtual Learning Hub in order to establish a network of European qualified gamehackers. The envisaged impact is reflected in the improvement of training schemes aimed at addressing incubation and acceleration managers and innovative training solutions to enforce growth-hacking related competences, promoting awareness on the European dimension of entrepreneurship coaching, enlarging information concerning innovative paths for business coaching training.
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