Entre­pre­neur­ship educa­tion and ecosys­tem in Cordoba, Spain

I spent a week in Cordoba, Spain in March (18.-22.3.2024) as a visit­ing teacher supported by Erasmus mobil­ity program. My host was Univer­sity of Cordoba (UCO), which is a new partner for Karelia UAS and also a new member of the INVEST Alliance.

Cordoba is situ­ated in the south­ern Andalu­sia region. It has roughly 300 000 inhab­i­tants. Cordoba has rich history, which I could easily observe walking the streets. The city has many churches and histor­i­cal buildings.

The Univer­sity of Cordoba is estab­lished in 1972. The campuses are located in differ­ent parts of Cordoba, some facul­ties even in the very center of the city.  Accord­ing to the univer­sity website: “The UCO is one of the fore­most research insti­tu­tions in Spain; a distinc­tion that will be further consol­i­dated with the creation of the Rabanales 21 Science and Tech­nol­ogy Park and the Maimonides Insti­tute for Biomed­ical Research.”

One thing that stood out for me of UCO’s prac­tices, was an annual inno­v­a­tive project compe­ti­tion aimed at faculty and staff of UCO. In this compe­ti­tion faculty members can propose small inno­v­a­tive project linked to educa­tion or some­thing else. It seems to be a great way to promote devel­op­ment culture in an organization!

Teach­ing experiences

As a visit­ing Erasmus teacher, I lectured about Market­ing for startup compa­nies, and Advis­ing and teach­ing startup compa­nies in EmprendeUCO.

In my lectur­ing I focused on the methods and approaches that we use here at Karelia UAS in the Draft Program®: How to define customer need inde­pen­dently of the product, how customer need helps defin­ing compe­ti­tion and then leads to effec­tive market­ing campaigns.

Empren­deUCO is an incu­ba­tion program target­ing people in Cordoba area wanting to start their own busi­ness. I visited the phys­i­cal facil­i­ties of the program and had the chance to coach the nascent entre­pre­neurs and watch how they pitched their busi­ness ideas. In the coach­ing session I helped teams to solve prob­lems they expe­ri­enced as most urgent. These were connected to the issues of product-market fit and prof­itabil­ity. I was able to use my expe­ri­ences from Joensuu working with startup compa­nies here.

Visit­ing ecosys­tem partners

Besides of my teach­ing I had the oppor­tu­nity to meet experts repre­sent­ing UCO’s tech­nol­ogy trans­fer offices OTRI, regional biotech­nol­ogy incu­ba­tor Incubadora Cordoba Biotech, and Fundecor (Fundación Univer­si­taria para el Desar­rollo de la Provin­cia de Córdoba), which is foun­da­tion focused on regional devel­op­ment in Cordoba area.

Visit­ing OTRI and Biotech incu­ba­tor it became clear that tailored feed­back and mentor­ing is crucial when working with star­tups whose founders are expe­ri­enced profes­sion­als. Manda­tory struc­tured sessions can easily have content that is not rele­vant for all partic­i­pants. Thus, tailored approach is better.

Visit­ing Fundecor I got the oppor­tu­nity to try out some gami­fied train­ing tools such as a card-based busi­ness model game. This game seems to be an excel­lent way to prac­tice how differ­ent elements of BMC (busi­ness model canvas) connect to each other using famous compa­nies such as Netflix and Star­bucks as examples.

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Author:

Heikki Immonen, Prin­ci­pal Lecturer, Karelia UAS

Kansikuva: Jose Gallardo