The University of Agder is hosting the Entrepreneurship Summer School of 2018

By Ingrid Dihle

The Entrepreneurship Summer School of 2018 will be held at the University of Agder 4-7 June this year. The four-day programme is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and an entrepreneurial consortium among six top universities in Norway.

The programme will be directed by Bill Aulet from MIT. It is a unique opportunity to be taught by an award-winning educator, author and managing director who is changing the way entrepreneurship is understood, taught, and practiced around the world.

Bill Aulet is currently Managing Director at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Bill Aulet, Managing Director at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice at MIT Sloan School of Management.

“The Entrepreneurship Summer School will be an extraordinary opportunity. First, participants who are interested in entrepreneurship will get a realistic and very practical framework on how to move forward to make their desires reality. Secondly, those with existing businesses in a matter of days, will gain wisdom from years of experience from hundreds of companies on how to make their businesses more successful,” Aulet says.

The summer school is an entrepreneurship accelerator programme to strengthen entrepreneurs and small companies’ expertise and scale-up potential. Participants will learn entrepreneurial skills and be equipped with a proven systematic and rigorous approach to growing their business to new heights.

The goal is to make it easier for new businesses to establish themselves on the international market and create more jobs in the different regions they represent. The primary focus is increasing awareness around scale-ups, entrepreneurship and an entrepreneurial mindset.

“This intensive full immersive four-day program will give participants concrete actions and confidence to implement them to realise their dreams of growing the companies to the next level the moment they complete the workshop,” Aulet says. 

Strengthening bonds with regional and local institutes

The Head of the Department of Management and Centre for Entrepreneurship at UiA, Bjørn-Tore Flåten, hopes this initiative and collaboration demonstrates the region’s interest in promoting aspiring Norwegian entrepreneurs and creates a collective awareness and aspiration to facilitate the growth of newly established businesses.

The collaboration is a result of a corresponding ambition among the contributors to promote upcoming Norwegian entrepreneurs by creating an ecosystem for entrepreneurship and exploring opportunities in a Nordic context.

“Hopefully, the exposure will showcase the unique Nordic pattern of a more interactive business to business model of communication,” Flåten says.

The six Norwegian universities collaborating with MIT on this project are the University of Agder, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), University of Bergen, University of Stavanger, the Norwegian Business School (BI), and the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Other contributors include ÅKP, GCE NODE, Global Centres of expertise (GCE Subsea), Greater Stavanger, Innovation Norway, Coworx and Innoventus South.

For more information about the Entrepreneurship Summer School, click here.