Creative Spark: Higher Education Enterprise Programme
Creative Spark: Higher Education Enterprise Programme is a five-year initiative to support international university and institutional partnerships to develop enterprise skills and creative economy across seven countries in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan), South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) and Ukraine through UK support.
The programme has been developed in response to an underdeveloped creative sector and a demand for entrepreneurship training in the programme countries, supporting wealth and job creation.
Creative Spark has three key elements:
- Development of the funded partnerships between universities and creative institutions in the UK and those in programme countries
- Delivering enterprise skills training packages to students and creative entrepreneurs, ranging from pitching ideas and starting a business, to protecting intellectual property and securing financial support – this will be further developed through a ‘video pitch’ competition, open to 100,000s of students across the programme countries next summer, with UK based professional development courses as prizes
- Delivering an English Learning Programme with a range of new digital language learning content. This will include online learning packs on the English Channel platform, online courses and new Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) focused on English for entrepreneurship
Creative Spark Partnership Fund is developed for building partnerships between universities and creative institutions in the UK and those in programme countries in order to support enterprise education and establish enterprise centres/hubs.
The grant is designed to enhance existing partnerships or foster new ones between UK Higher Education Institutions, related national bodies in the creative sector and the equivalent institutions in the participating countries.
Partnerships aim to support the following areas:
- Skills development for students and young creative entrepreneurs
- Supporting new business activation and incubation
- Knowledge exchange
Within the programme Ilia State University collaborates with the University Of The West Of England in Bristol (UWE Bristol), which is definitely an innovator delivering entrepreneurial education throughout the UK.