I-Box attends the 3rd WOMCA project meeting

On December 13rd and 14th, 2018, took place the 3rd WOMCA project meeting in Innsbruck, Austria, at the headquarters of FIB.

The WOMCA project is addressed to young women mentors who work with young women social entrepreneurs. The aim of the project is to provide new tools that help young mentors while accompanying young women entrepreneurs during the hard but satisfying way of entrepreneurship. Many women who funded companies agree about the need for having referents and examples of other entrepreneur women who experienced the same situation, who can guide them during the entrepreneurship process. A mentor is an added value active when starting a business. Having a person who accompanies you during the first stages of entrepreneurship makes it easiest. Someone who counsels, who helps you to make fewer mistakes, who guides you to take chances correctly and organize a better time administration; even to leader better teams. A mentor can give less subjective pieces of advising and an alternative view when making decisions. Knowing everything is impossible and the link entrepreneur-mentor is key factor to became successful.

The project’s goal is to create a training program that provides new tools for mentoring. The program is focused on the following competencies: entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation and interpersonal skills. It has also created a unique intervention model that brings together methodologies such as Brickme, LEGO® Serious Play® , Business Model You, Gamification and Design Thinking.

In the meeting, that took place in Innsbruck, Austria, there were representatives from all the companies and associations involved in the project. The meeting coincided with the pilot course “Breaking the fears of being young women entrepreneurs” developed by WOMCA, in which 15 women from 4 different countries (Austria, The Netherlands, Spain and Lituania) participated, in order to receive the training and provide feedback to the partners, so they can improve the final version of the course before developing the e-learning course, which will be available on the internet.

All the attendants had previous expertise on entrepreneurship. They wanted to become mentors in order to help others women, and they all agreed the fact that despite having different backgrounds and nationalities, they had more common traits as young women entrepreneurs than different ones: fears, barriers, challenges and motivations.

The next step is the adaptation of the training to a MOOC (massive online open course) format, so it Will be available to all those people who are or want to become mentorsand help other women to entrepreneur.