Start-up Lab: A Springboard for University Entrepreneurship and Students’ Start-ups

Entrepreneurship education initiatives can play an important role in promoting entrepreneurial skills and a proactive mindset in learners, as well as in launching new business ventures from students graduating from higher education institutions. Since 2013 the course Start-up Lab is striving to promote entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation skills for graduate students, Ph.D. candidates, and lifelong learners of the University of Trento. Start-up Lab is an extracurricular 3-month program carried out by CLab Trento, an interdepartmental initiative of the University of Trento that aims to enable students with different backgrounds to work on the creation and incubation of their ideas through entrepreneurial learning activities. As a hands-on laboratory, Start-up Lab follows five steps: idea generation, validation, business modelling, financial planning and pitching. The program core is based on the principles of business design, a methodology for designing innovative products and services that meet the needs of the customers, through an iterative and incremental method aimed at testing the main assumptions underlying an innovative business model well before the launch of the real product on the market. The course has adopted a comprehensive learning assessment toolkit, as means to infuse into students a self-reflective mindset and a self-directed learning approach. This laboratory trains students to develop an enterprising mindset to support new venture creation and, more generally, the upskilling of human capital, also in terms of employability in the job market.