actionED

Problem Statement

Under non-crisis circumstances, almost 70% of entrepreneurs fail within the first years of conception and only 10% ever grow. As statistics demonstrate this percentage (70%) will grow higher during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The facts:

• 42% of the startups globally are threatened in what is called “red zone”, meaning that if the situation remains as it is today, they have a few months till they die. This number has increased by 31% since December 2019.
• North American and European startups have reduced their workforce by 84% and 67% accordingly, followed by Asia with a percentage of 59%
• 74% of startups have seen their revenues decline since the emergence of COVID-19 crisis.
• 3 out of 4 startups work in industries severely affected by COVID-19.

Our Solution

actionED is an online platform that offers an asynchronous, adaptive science-based entrepreneurial training, whilst creating a global community, where entrepreneurs have the chance to exchange ideas and access a network of trusted business professionals.

actionED aims to

1. Support entrepreneurial activity (during and after the pandemic) that is on decline, throughout the world in order to help entrepreneurs not only maintain their current position in the market but also boost their business outcomes (e.g. sales, productivity).
2. Enhance economic and regional development, that has been negatively affected, by supporting entrepreneurs.
3. Support the continuity of rigorous scientific research that has in many instances been disrupted in the domain of entrepreneurship. The platform will have plugin functions to support cross-cultural and longitudinal data collection, which has been severely affected due to COVID-19.
4. Address the unequal access to entrepreneurship education.
5. Introduce online scientific entrepreneurial training in order to fill the existing gap evidenced in the literature, which is the lack of data-driven and rigorous entrepreneurship training.

The story behind it

Scientific literature suggests that countries can prosper through good entrepreneurs, hence it is crucial during these unprecedented events to best facilitate entrepreneurship in order to strengthen entrepreneurial outcomes and support economic growth. Numerous studies around the world have shown that entrepreneurship skills can be acquired; one implication is that by training entrepreneurs on skills that have been found to promote entrepreneurial performance through behavioural changes, the likelihood for businesses to survive and even grow increases. Furthermore, prior studies have shown that entrepreneurs that receive psychology-based entrepreneurial training interventions show a higher survival rate and growth in comparison to small firms that do not receive any intervention. The proposed solution transfers, from offline to online, a well-validated psychology-based entrepreneurial training, results of which have been published to numerous scientific journals, a fact that increases the validity and reliability of the training intervention.

How is this going to work

1. Our idea has been validated by our partners, who have demonstrated a huge interest in our idea, especially after the coronavirus outbreak. We have already partnered with different organisations (ministries, accelerators, incubators) and universities in different countries that are interested to immediately provide our training to entrepreneurs.
2. Transfer the offline content to online learning
3. A platform that will host the training needs to be developed.
4. The plan is to outsource IT team to develop the platform, the researchers will provide the script to the IT developers
5. actionED will be promoted to entrepreneurs through accelerators, incubators and ministries in different countries.

Financing actionED actionED is established as a non-profit organisation. Using its surplus of the revenues to further achieve its objectives of optimising the entrepreneurial activity, especially in times of crisis, whilst contributing to overcome greater issues such as economic inequality or poverty. To achieve that, actionED seeks alternative ways of funding through EU and global institutions, incubators/crowdfunding platforms/investors that cater to the entrepreneurs. The trusted business partners/experts that will be part of our community will also pay a subscription fee in order to promote their services to our platform.

The Impact of our Solution

Offer accessible online training to affected entrepreneurs On an individual level, we aim to make entrepreneurial education easily accessible to anyone throughout the world, especially to regions where offline entrepreneurship training was already very restricted.

Time and cost-efficient The online training will be free to all users. Also, entrepreneurs will be able to access the platform from their personal devices.

Offer psychological assistance During the COVID-19 crisis, entrepreneurs would actively seek psychological support, which is one of the main elements of our training and what differentiates our solution from potential other traditional entrepreneurship training interventions.

Understanding of the business market and actionable initiatives By attending our training we argue that entrepreneurs not only will develop capabilities that will help them overcome the barriers facing (e.g. insecurities, negative emotions), but will also better understand where they stand in the current market, what they can do differently in the current crisis situation to differentiate themselves immediately. Throughout the training, entrepreneurs learn how to develop innovative projects and at the end of the training, all entrepreneurs will have created new products, services or projects that they would be able to launch to the market.

Develop crucial psychological attributes By completing the training, entrepreneurs apart from developing a new or optimised product (service or project) will also strengthen psychological attributes (e.g. self-starting behaviours) that make them be more persistent and not give up during the crisis but also after the crisis.

Boost entrepreneurial business activity On a macro-level, by attending the training, maintenance and enhancement of entrepreneurial activity will be reinforced. This argument is based on previous research data. Entrepreneurs will add to national income, continue supporting economic development and growth and create social change.

Improve regional and global economies Overall this is a science-based solution that aims to nurture the entrepreneurial capabilities that have been shown to mostly influence entrepreneurial outcomes, which in turn result in positive economic and social impact.

The value of our solution after the crisis:

1. Our online training will ensure the scalability of our solution, meaning that we will be able to impact startup founders and novice entrepreneurs on a very large scale. Our training is a purely science-based intervention that has been vastly applied offline and has been published in numerous scientific journals. Those facts signal not only the effectiveness of our solution but also its reliability and validity.

2. The majority of studies on traditional business training interventions have not been found to have a sustained impact on profits and have shown small effect sizes. The most possible explanations for these outcomes are that either the traditional business training programs don’t teach the right set of skills or that what is taught doesn’t actually create enough change.

3. The Randomised Control Trial element of the platform will bridge the gaps evidenced in the entrepreneurship literature by including pre and post interventions’ evaluation.

4. Public bodies are interested in capitalising on entrepreneurship training and education due to their influence on economic development, hence it is of paramount importance to provide not only policymakers but also entrepreneurs and scholars with actual data of the effectiveness of psychology-based entrepreneurial training that will, in turn, help them allocate or not further funding for educational purposes.