by Paolo Bertolero

Abstract: Staff at the University of Turin (UNITO) in Italy are using results from their HEInnovate self-assessment to make a case to their University board about the need for amplified attention and resources in order to provide a designated meeting place and increase student awareness and staff support for their 2030 Academy programme. They also hope to continue making connections throughout the HEInnovate community so that they can expand the programme across other European universities.

Could you share more about your background and the work you are involved in at your institution?

I am Paolo Bertolero, an entrepreneur who started and helps lead the 2030 Academy programme at the University of Turin (UNITO). UNITO hosts the 2030 Academy, which is a training laboratory founded by the Department of Economics and Statistics in 2015 and designed to help students across all academic disciplines and year groups to build their entrepreneurial skills through tackling one of the goals for the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The training takes students through the process of coming up with business ideas, testing their ideas, developing prototypes, securing funding for their ideas, and presenting their ideas to a jury of potential investors, which has led to the development of several start-ups. The 2030 Academy has helped to train over 600 students on the topics of innovation and entrepreneurship, and many have expressed that it has had a positive impact on their lives. Some students in the 2030 Academy have gone on to work full-time for the companies they conceived of as part of their time in the 2030 Academy, while others have gone on to work for start-ups. In general, our UNITO professors notice that students become more self-aware, confident, and better at communicating and working in multidisciplinary teams after their involvement in the 2030 Academy.

What specific challenges or gaps at your institution led you to use HEInnovate as a tool for support and improvement?

The 2030 Academy has only a few advisors and is overall lacking in resources. The staff managing the 2030 Academy feel that UNITO is falling behind other universities in Italy in terms of its entrepreneurial initiatives and its training opportunities for teachers to boost their own entrepreneurial approach to teaching. To find solutions for this problem, I turned to the HEInnovate self-assessment tool to produce concrete proof of these shortcomings after I attended the Train the Trainers session in Brussels in the autumn of 2023.

What HEInnovate activity did you engage in, and how did the outcomes help you identify institutional challenges or inform future development plans?

I took the HEInnovate self-assessment myself, as did two other members of my team. The results from the self-assessment, which showed that UNITO needed improvement in all eight HEInnovate dimensions, helped our team to structure our argument to the University board, which was submitted in February of 2024, evidencing the need for increased resources, as well as what my team would do with them going forward. Those plans included increasing awareness about the 2030 Academy, encouraging more students to take part, finding a permanent space where students can consistently meet and collaborate, expanding the staff to manage the Academy and improve the promotion of the 2030 Academy as well as the availability of mentors to work with students, allowing more students to take part.

What outcomes have resulted from your engagement with HEInnovate, and how do you plan to develop this work further?

Going forward, our staff at the 2030 Academy aim for the case they have made to the University board, backed up by the HEInnovate self-assessment they conducted, to be successful in securing additional resources for entrepreneurial initiatives at UNITO. Furthermore, it is also my team’s ambition to get in touch with other universities and other entrepreneurship initiatives through making connections at HEInnovate workshops and webinars. I am open to the idea of expanding the 2030 Academy programme across other European universities. I would like to explore potential partnerships with other universities that are members of the HEInnovate user community.