Be young be entrepreneur

We are a network of partners based in rural areas, just over an hour from major cities in France, Greece, Italy and Portugal. Inland, second-rate or forgotten territories: they are sparsely populated, suffer from the exodus of young people who have no interest in them, as well as from the loss of skills (brain drain) that are exported elsewhere... As a result, they benefit from less wealth, with a climate that is not conducive to agriculture. Nevertheless, a number of professional sectors are committed to making the region more attractive. Innovative structures, such as the French “tiers-lieu”, AGORA Guiers, offer alternative solutions for pooling knowledge and digital equipment in order to catalyze local initiatives and help entrepreneurs structure themselves to develop their economic activity in the long term. We're convinced that this network of partners offers solutions that can be pooled and brought together to provide young people and local communities with lasting added value, a guarantee of innovation and attractiveness.

In these impoverished areas, we wanted to show young people that people are the beating heart of these communities, and that they have the necessary resources within them, whatever their chosen field: tourism, service activities or agriculture. We wanted these rural areas in the broadest sense of the term (businesses, schools, municipalities and associations) to identify their strengths, capitalizing on the European openness of this partnership to acquire new tools for collective intelligence and project development, to define and master processes specific to entrepreneurship and the spirit of initiative. We wanted to put young people in business creation situations, so that they could experiment with and understand the processes involved in emerging, testing and structuring new products and services. The aim was to create new wealth for our rural territories and their communities. In a world where egocentricity is omnipresent, we wanted to show just how much complementarity, otherness and team spirit are strengths that need to be articulated to succeed in the challenge of a promising and sustainable economy in a rural context.

Several types of activities were implemented: -incentive activities, based on mutual acquaintance and cooperation, creating links between the young people themselves and local players, -activities to discover the associative fabric and economic context of our rural European territories, -activities to define the stages in the process of creating a service or product and the operating model of a company (with the conviction of care management), role-playing activities to understand the characteristics and workings of the business world, -inter-student challenges to come up with new products or services. -activities to communicate and promote this commitment within a partnership serving its rural support area.

We modeled a game to highlight the added value of behavioral skills, team spirit and communication and innovation talents within a company, in order to optimize its operations. The game was tested and used in each region, allowing students to experience the challenges and paradoxes of fictitious situations before imagining and developing their own products and services based on local assets and aimed at our rural areas. Challenges between students led to the development of around thirty project outlines, enabling the emergence of new resources in the fields of agriculture, services and tourism. 4 products were selected for full development: -in Portugal, working in partnership with the municipality, a heritage building was rehabilitated into a mixed space for tourism and the business world (resource and coworking space). -in Italy, students in the beauty sector conceptualized and developed a beauty and fitness space. -in France, an escape-game has been designed to provide an unusual and fun way of welcoming new students to the PRAVAZ high school. -In Greece, gastronomic and wellness products have been created to promote the unique buffalo farming industry.