Business Garden is a project of Trust Eureka, conceived and created by Golinelli Foundation in collaboration with the Municipality of Bologna and H-Farm, which in 2015 will also make use of the collaboration of Unindustria Bologna, to teach business culture in an informal environment, involving secondary school children in a new and stimulating educational path.
The first edition of the Business Garden in 2014/2015 involved sixty third and fourth year girls and boys from over 12 high schools in the Emilia-Romagna Region. The two winning projects received funding of 8.000 euros each to be able to put their business idea into practice, producing a prototype and starting the first phase of experimentation.
Business Garden is an innovative project in the national context that goes beyond the traditional skills training offer of the Italian school and university system. Successful entrepreneurs and exponents of the academic world alternate in a structured and high-profile path, which accompanies students with lessons, project work, events and practical activities aimed at concrete experimentation and the start-up of an original business idea.
Business Garden it is neither the spin off of a research center nor a startup incubator: it is a "nursery". A place where people cultivate and grow, an educational project designed so that girls and boys have opportunities to try their hand and even make mistakes.
The vision that underlies the project concerns the development of talents and personality, in a logic of positive, constructive and ethical approach to life's challenges.
There are skills that are not transmitted theoretically, but are learned by seeing the masters at work and through concrete experience. For these there are no schools: taste, civic sense, entrepreneurship are some examples. We can design ad hoc learning paths to mend a cultural evolution which, in some respects, has been interrupted with the disappearance of some traditional relationships. These must now be reactivated with awareness of the contemporary condition.
Entrepreneurship is a value, a knowledge, an approach to life, but its learning processes remain largely informal: we learn from family, friends, the cultural environment in which we grow up, but it can be said that, with exceptions, there are currently no schools that embrace the branches of knowledge and know-how that entrepreneurship requires.
Informal learning is such precisely because knowledge is complex and based mainly on the example of those who testify to knowing how to do more than on textbooks and manuals. You learn to be an entrepreneur, they say, at the "school of life". Certainly some fundamental skills and resources such as management, finance, production engineering, law as well as even before the traditional subjects of study (science, history, philosophy, etc ...), can be learned in a formal way. But the sum of this knowledge does not make an entrepreneur: courage, team spirit, vision, charisma, leadership, curiosity, ambition, will, empiricism and research, orientation towards the future and the realization of the social good, like many other characteristics of the entrepreneur, cannot be learned from textbooks. For this reason, a new form of innovative school is now essential, which integrates with traditional educational and training courses by bringing all the knowledge defined as "informal", which is indispensable in today's economic and cultural panorama.
