Network for Intercultural Competence to facilitate Entrepreneurship (NICE) – students addressing global challenges in an international and interdisciplinary online initiative

A new generation of graduates with entrepreneurial knowledge and skills, together with business awareness and cultural competencies that can be applied in local, national and global settings are essential to enable a successful response to the ambitious societal, environmental and economic targets being across the world. The NICE programme is designed to help address some of this. The partnership brings expertise from eight institutions across Europe, and has been running for three years. It was initially a two year ERASMUS+ project to fund development of resources, staff training and capacity building, together with a programme of online student team interactions and summer schools. Its format has enabled it to successfully self-sustain in its third year during covid. Student work packages were developed as shared resources on both cultural competency and entrepreneurship. Students were able to participate for ECTS academic credit from the University of Edinburgh, utilising their well established Student-Led, Individually-Created Courses (SLICCs) experiential learning and assessment framework, based around a reflective e-portfolio. Participating students worked together in multi-disciplinary international groups on a project that was invariably a ‘wicked problem’, so difficult to define and continues to shift, that had a global and/or local perspectives. Projects were framed around one or more of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/). Students had autonomy to select the project, and then as a group and in conjunction with their international tutor, to co-create the subsequent direction. We have been able to demonstrate that students successfully develop their cultural competence, entrepreneurship skills and also a wide range of transversal interdisciplinary professional attributes. Students were able to clearly articulate the depth and breadth of this learning through their reflective e-portfolio submission and presentations. The resources and separate work packages on both entrepreneurship and cultural competency are now developed and established. They have been successfully used by the project, and are now open resource that are being used by others. From the standpoint of the course organisation, academic credit and assessment, there are quite different academic cultures across Europe, and as reflected by the partners. Nevertheless, the delivery processes used successfully cut across this. As evidence, there was remarkable consistency between tutors from all the partner institutions in their final assessment. NICE offers resources that can be used in an integrated way, or adapted, to develop student’s entrepreneurship and cultural competency, important graduate attributes to respond effectively in our increasingly complex world