FAMily BusinEss Sustainability and Growth.

A former project helping SME Family Business (FB) owners and/or managers to cope with the complex challenges of the imposing generational transition, the INSIST project, produced country reports on the partner countries’ SME FB systems and the findings proved to be much more significant than anticipated. The results of Insist research, outreaching much beyond the scope of that project can be boiled down in two major outcomes:

• There is an increasing need for appropriate SME FB-mentor trainings with special focus on soft skills, hard knowledge and competences in the countries, but such courses are essentially missing. This conclusion originated another ongoing VET project, called TRUST-ME, targeting to produce VET teaching modules for fast-track SME FB-mentor training.
• During the implementation of the project Insist partners realised that a very dynamic development of the FB research is evolving rapidly in Europe. Family Businesses (FB), giving an overwhelming contribution to the countries’ GDPs (above 70%!), are endangered without having external support helping them develop a sustainable strategy in general and manage a velvet GT in particular.

INSIST project is on  the INtergenerational Succession in SMEs' Transition. It is co-financed by the ERASMUS + European programme as a Startegic Partnership project.

WikiNomics is a Lifelong Learning Programme project co-financed by the European Union for 2 years under the Leonardo da Vinci programme, started in November 2013. 
The Wikinomics project aims to foster key competences required for employability in the constantly changing environments of the world of work. It sets free-culture and wiki methodologies as the basis for an innovative pedagogical methodology.

OI-Net is the European Academic Network for Open Innovation. It was the EU co-financed project by the Lifelong Learning Programme under ERASMUS designed to promote cooperation on open innovation (OI) topics in European Higher Education curricula and institutes for the benefit of EU competitiveness. The aim was to facilitate European cooperation by outlining and exchanging up-to-date concepts, and good practices in open innovation and open innovation education. It identified the needs, challenges, and obstacles of public and private sectors in the exploitation of open innovation.

PEST project is a Partnership project for the Exchange of experience in Student on-the-job Training. It is co-financed by the Lifelong Learning Programme under Leonardo da Vinci programme. The main short term objective of this series of workshops is to mutually discover the experience of the VET provider partner institutions in trainee placements at business sector partners as mandatory part of their learning pathways.