EU Community of Practice
Major progress on inclusive entrepreneurship has been made through the EU's EQUAL Community Initiative which included a theme on business creation that was taken up in approximately half the EU Member States. This action research has led to the development of a community of practice on inclusive entrepreneurship called COPIE. COPIE was led by Flanders and Germany with partners in Spain, Portugal, and the UK and observers in France, the Netherlands, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Romania. COPIE developed a series of tools to facilitate the assessment of enterprise support systems from the point of view of a wide range of specific groups (e.g. women, minority ethnic groups, migrants, people with disabilities, young people and older people). Much of its learning has been capitalised on a wiki at http://www.wikipreneurship.eu.
Following the end of EQUAL, COPIE 2, a learning network under the Learning for Change programme, has been established. Again led by Germany, it includes Flanders, Wallonia, the Czech Republic, Spain, Andalucía and Lithuania. It has working groups on:
- policy co-ordination
- access to finance
- entrepreneurship education
- coaching and mentoring
- quality management and inclusive business support
- a European diagnostic & benchmarking tool
Read more about this topic: Inclusive Entrepreneurship
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