A Self-employment Career Option for Elite Athletes: Innovative Sport-focused Entrepreneurship Bootcamp
▶Summary
Background Elite athletes face the challenge of balancing intense sporting careers with education or work. Intensive training and competitions limit their engagement with the educational system and labour market. Elite athletes possess exceptional potential for entrepreneurship, with their unique skills, networks, and profiles allowing them to initiate their own business ventures. Despite this, their schedules often restrict their access to specific entrepreneurial education and training. Objectives ELCAMP's mission is to support the EU's dual career policies by developing a sports-focused entrepreneurship "Bootcamp" program for athletes. ELCAMP aims to cultivate entrepreneurial competencies among elite athletes, assisting them in transforming their business ideas into socioeconomic value. ELCAMP utilises the skills and networks of athletes to prepare them for business ventures during or after their sporting careers, thereby filling the existing gap in specific entrepreneurial education. Implementation WP-1 created a sports-centric entrepreneurship curriculum based on literature reviews, interviews, surveys, and focus groups. WP-2 entailed developing training modules, which were then validated through testing and revisions. A toolkit was assembled and integrated into the modules during WP-3. WP-4 included a pilot of the entrepreneurship bootcamp, which included international workshops and online training. In WP-5, a multilingual, gamification-based web platform was tested, and revised. Achievements ELCAMP supported athletes in conceptualizing and enhancing their business ventures. The project successfully developed an innovative bootcamp curriculum and training modules, providing a comprehensive toolkit for sports entrepreneurship. Moreover, ELCAMP launched a supportive web platform offering mentoring, networking, and learning resources, empowering athletes in the sports industry. The sports entrepreneurship bootcamp fostered an entrepreneurial mindset among high-performance athletes.