A special edition of HETFA workshops took place on 10 October in the frame of Erasmus + Days. The event was hosted by Loffice co-working place and aimed to investigate the possibilities of revealing the entrepreneurial potential of women.
Firstly, the Erasmus+ funded project ifempower was presented aiming to empower female students from any fields in higher education to launch entreprises. Then the results of the first empirical research were introduced in details by our research fellow, Réka Geambasu. The research covered 7 European countries and consisted of the outcomes of interviews with almost hundred women entrepreneurs and stakeholders related to female entrepreneurship.
Participants of the workshop highly appreciated the findings and the first recommendations formulated representing a unique and niche character of the research. Before the round-table discussion, the Foundation Coworkid introduced its activities: based in Loffice aiming to support young parents in getting back to labour market or starting entrepreneurship they organize various events and trainings for them.
For the round-table discussion additional experts and professionals were invited, namely:
- Eszter Szabó, Founding President of the Association Women/Business/Angels
- Kata Keveházi, Founder of JÓL-LÉT Foundation
- Gigi Tímár, knowledge managemenet director of Budapest LAB,
- Andrea Szablár, manager of Coworkid.
The discussion tapped on a number of host issues related to woman entrepreneurship. Participants agreed that nowadays, the way of becoming entrepreneur for woman is much easier than 10-20 years ago. But this is also true in general terms: entrepreneurship as such has gained higher prestige and especially for women it is a real choice once they have family and do not want to have fixed 8-hour long work.
Nowadays, there are more and more trainings available for those who are interested in taking up entrepreneurship. However, in many cases, following the start-up phase they are not able to continue this in a sustainable way or to scale up for greater profit or more employees.
Since the current education system is still not entirelly in line with the needs of the labour market and its working methods, any training and education programme which supports team work and relies on transsectoral, case-based and non-formal educational methods are important and shall be further promoted, such as the one being piloted by ifempower or the one launched by Budapest LAB and the Moholy-Nagy University of Art.
Participants also agreed that such programmes shall not only train for successful entrepreneurship but also to find out how to overcome failures. As Eszter Szabó added in America business angels only invest in those start-uppers who had already passed by a collapse. Tools for self-reflection and strategies to overcome such situations should be also transferred.