SCIENT – a European University-Business Alliance aiming to foster young SCIEntists’ ENTrepreneurial spirit – is an EU-funded project taking place across eight countries including Cyprus, Spain, Portugal, Germany, England, Lithuania, Italy and Malta. The partner countries have developed an innovative and practically oriented entrepreneurship training course which is being offered in project partner countries at no cost.

The project is financed by the Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance programme of the European Commission with an overall budget of €991,778 for 36 months from January 2015. The project is led by GrantXpert Consulting Ltd from Cyprus and includes another 14 organisations from the eight partner countries where Malta is represented by Paragon Europe.

Through in-depth analysis of existing entrepreneurship programmes, accelerators, science and technological hubs and incubators in the EU and beyond, the purpose of the SCIENT project is to identify the existing gap and to develop a new, top-quality pre-accelerator programme for PhD or doctorate level STEM students and graduates. Since scientific knowledge lies at the heart of the European knowledge economy, SCIENT focuses on developing successful scientific entrepreneurs.

Paragon Europe will be launching for the first time the pre-accelerator programme in Malta dedicated to STEM Phd/doctorate level students and graduates between October and November. The venues will be: 295B, Constitution Street, Mosta and Life Sciences Park in San Gwann.

The course will cover six main modules: Access yourself and build your team; Build your value proposition and test it; Find your business model and get into the market; Lean Business Planning; How to cope with innovation; and How to pitch and find investors. Places are limited and participants reading for Phd in STEM or MBc programmes or graduates in scientific fields are kindly requested to apply by September 30.

The course will bring business knowledge to the scientific world. Following the 40-hour taught programme, participants will get 20 hours of job shadowing and mentoring. Ten participants will have the opportunity to travel for a one-week-paid internship to one of the following countries: Germany, Italy, Portugal, Lithuania, Spain or Cyprus. Besides the paid internship, participants will meet other graduates, visit companies, network with entrepreneurs and have 20 hours of mentoring and job shadowing.

Five participants will have the opportunity to participate in an EU business competition in Cyprus and to pitch their ideas in front of investors. The winners of the competition will be given awards from the consortium.

To apply for the course, contact diana.arutjunjan@paragoneurope.eu or visit www.paragoneurope.eu.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.