Конференция „Design Thinking For Digital Innovation“

As the world’s business landscape evolves, universities are attempting to keep up by fostering teaching that supports an interdisciplinary and new approach to solving problems. Both the complexity and uncertainty of society and the economy will require HEIs to continuously adapt while upholding quality standards. (OECD, 2012). They should act as “hubs” to support entrepreneurs beyond their staff and students, providing in this way opportunities to learn both generic and professional competencies as well as to build networks and pathways for employment after graduation.

Against this backdrop, the European Commission in collaboration with OECD has already developed a framework HEInnovate for self-assessment of entrepreneurial universities. Based on this universities have the opportunity to evaluate and adapt their curricula and study courses to be innovative and entrepreneurial and meet the requirements and needs of business. The question remains how with what tools. In this respect digital technologies and respective skills are required.

The European Commission is preparing a ‘New Skills Agenda for Europe’ which should be adopted in May 2016. The ‘e-Skills for Jobs’ campaign is another effort to align the European economy to the new digital reality and close the gap between the number of job seekers in Europe and the number of unfilled digital jobs.

A proposal for a comprehensive European Framework for the ICT profession should be available in 2017. Based on our previous experience and research the partner countries involved – Bulgaria, Spain, Slovakia, Italy – are still lagging behind in terms of environment enabling digital entrepreneurship.

According to the Digital Entrepreneurship Scoreboard 2015 we are ranked as Moderate enabling environment that exhibits the lowest scores for all the dimensions especially innovation and digital knowledge base, digital skills and e-leadership. Slovakia is the only partner ranked a level higher in these dimensions. The partnership was formed by well-known partners with good relations in order to join forces and tackle a common challenge and help other countries overcome these barriers.