EEE partnership and La Trobe University of Melbourne, Australia have signed a MoU to collaborate in the field of entrepreneurship education.
The EEE consortium has been contacted by Dr. Silvia McCormack of La Trobe University in May 2017 leading to first successful talks between representatives of either sides shortly afterwards. La Trobe University has recently introduced a rather progressive approach for the integration of entrepreneurship education among all its faculties. As a matter of fact, the components of innovation and entrepreneurship, global citizenship, and sustainability thinking, referred to as “Three Essentials”, have become part of regular course curriculum ever since then. [1]
In her function as Academic Coordinator (coursework) at the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, Dr McCormack was highly involved in the theoretical development as well as the operational implementation of this approach inside her institution. Given La Trobe`s leading role in the field of entrepreneurship education, the consortium unanimously agreed to propose an associate partnership within EEE. La Trobe officials have equally expressed their interest to exchange best-practice experiences and intellectual resources to foster entrepreneurial aspirations and efforts of students and staff in the involved HEIs.
While the formalization of the partnership was in progress, the EEE team of Management Center Innsbruck has had the pleasure to welcome Dr. McCormack from La Trobe University in Innsbruck already last month. Among others, the institutional approaches for entrepreneurship education pursued at La Trobe and MCU were discussed during this first fruitful meeting. Additionally, MCI officials presented Dr. McCormack the first draft of the EEE Teaching Toolkit – a bundle of high-quality teaching material on entrepreneurship addressing HEI lecturers. In the meantime, La Trobe and EEE officials have mutually signed a Memorandum of Understanding agreement that will allow to further deepen ties between all stakeholders in the months ahead.
Mutual benefits
Given the obvious high potentials to positively contribute to the success of the project, the EEE consortium is strongly convinced of the mutual benefits that will result from the collaboration between EEE and La Trobe. In fact, both sides decided to intensify talks in the upcoming months to identify further areas of collaboration. Apart from jointly discussing and piloting EEE project outputs as well as exchange best-practices experiences, the collaboration with La Trobe University may as well be the impetus to initiate new projects in the field of entrepreneurship education involving all EEE partnering institutions soon.
[1] McCormack, S., Scanlon, C. (2017 in press). Integrating innovation and entrepreneurship into all undergraduate courses: The case of one university in Australia. In Nygard, C. (Ed), Teaching of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education. Libri Publsihing, London.