ENTREPRENEDU: Closing a Chapter, Opening New Doors for Europe’s Innovators

As the ENTREPRENEDU – Enhancing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Education project comes to a close, EBAN is proud to reflect on its role in helping bring this ambitious initiative to life. For the past years, ENTREPRENEDU has been on a mission to close the innovation gap across Europe by supporting youth, startups, and researchers in turning ideas into real businesses. By bringing together partners from six countries — Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, Belgium, Germany, and Ireland — the project created a bridge between high-performing innovation hubs and regions still building their entrepreneurial capacity. From the start, EBAN’s focus was clear: connect the project’s activities to real investment networks and ensure that the entrepreneurs emerging from ENTREPRENEDU could access the knowledge, mentorship, and funding they needed to grow.

What ENTREPRENEDU Achieved

ENTREPRENEDU set out bold goals — and delivered:

• 3 Hackathons in Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria, bringing together 111 teams and surfaced nearly 100 business ideas from young innovators.
• 16 workshops which provided participants with entrepreneurial skills, from validating ideas to building business models.
• 12 selected teams received over 60 hours of tailored mentoring, with more than half strategically involving women founders.
• A comprehensive Venture Building Program was created and implemented in 3 countries, reaching 207 students — complete with a syllabus covering problem identification, solution development, market discovery, business modeling, and access to finance.
• A Venture Fellowship Program connected 102 students with accelerators and initiatives, helping them move from classroom concepts to real-world impact.
• Finally, ENTREPRENEDU produced guidelines, case studies, and a business plan to make the model highly replicable across European educational institutions.

EBAN’s Role and Perspective

As the voice of Europe’s angel investing community, EBAN’s role in ENTREPRENEDU was to connect education to investment. We brought an investor’s lens to the table — helping ensure that the project didn’t just teach entrepreneurial theory but prepared founders for real-world funding conversations and connections with angels, VCs, and accelerators.

ENTREPRENEDU also aligned perfectly with EBAN’s wider mission to level the playing field across Europe’s innovation landscape. The focus on low and moderate innovation regions like Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria is vital — because talent is everywhere, but opportunity isn’t.

Looking Ahead

ENTREPRENEDU may be ending as a project, but its impact will continue. The venture building syllabus, hackathon model, and fellowship network it created are designed to be reused, adapted, and scaled across Europe. For EBAN, this is just the beginning. We’ll continue working to ensure that more early-stage founders — especially from underrepresented regions and communities — have the tools, mentorship, and investment opportunities they need to thrive.

Feel free to explore the initiative and open access documentation to learn more: ENTREPRENEDU – Enhancing entrepreneurial ecosystems for education