“An innovation business is one which lives and breathes “outside the box”. It is not just good ideas, it is a combination of good ideas, motivated staff and instinctive understanding of what your customer wants”, says Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group. But how to design and create an innovative business model? People’s Ukrainian Academy and South Westphalia University have their own secret and experience.

Innovation, learning perspectives and creativity are the three pillars that make modern entrepreneurs competitive. And contemporary universities play a key role in implementation of these principles. In the world there are universities – archetypes of academic incubator, some of them are experienced with start-ups and spin-offs and others are combined into large innovative clusters. But all of them are interested in entrepreneurship development.

Kharkiv University of Humanities “People’s Ukrainian Academy” has its own successful projects that contribute to developing of innovative, flexible and people-learning business. One of such projects was held jointly with South Westphalia University of Applied Science in Germany in November 2015. There was 3-day training Seminar "Entrepreneurship fostering social, cultural and environmental developments in Europe" (supported by EVZ Stiftung).

The seminar covered many aspects of entrepreneurship development and had its specific features. After all participants had been divided into groups per 4 persons they were challenged with learning and training activities. But first of all students had to overcome multicultural misunderstanding and they were really successful with it!

During the Seminar trainers (Prof. Dr. Ewald Mittelstädt, PhD Oksana Basmanova, Olena Mykolenko, Maryna Stepanova) used innovative approaches, techniques and tools to generating of new business ideas and business models. The seminar was aimed at creating of learning and synergetic effect that encouraged making suggestions and questions concerning social, cultural and environmental developments in Europe. All participants also didn’t forget to create unique value proposition to deliver to their customers only the needed products and services!

Few days later the students made presentations of their projects. All projects were very different – from green production and devices for measuring energy savings to unusual tourism and entertainments. But the common was a platform (internet-platform) as a business model to realize unique value proposition!

All participants of this project has got personal development due to combination of both iterative design and incremental build of business-models, improved professional and communication skills!