MyDigiCoop

Haaga-Helia is participating in the Mydigicoop project, a strategic partnership project co-funded by the European Union's Erasmus+ programme, which will end in February 2023. MyDigiCoop aims to promote social cooperative entrepreneurship in higher education. In the project we created personalised digital learning pathways for university students. To achieve this, university educators were trained to use innovative online tools.

The project aims to equip HE professionals with innovative online tools and competencies to foster social-cooperative entrepreneurship among their students.

Objectives of the project:

• to map HE students’ entrepreneur and cooperative profiles,
• to design personalised online learning paths for HE students with the aim of supporting HE educators in the development of the students’ entrepreneurial competences,
• to create an interactive virtual platform to support the development of social cooperative economy and social entrepreneurship,
• to provide the required skills, competences, and materials to teachers in HE to foster social-cooperative entrepreneurship in their courses, and
• to strengthen synergies and cooperation among HE institutions, companies from both public and private sector, and associations by means of including their needs in the training course.

The project is coordinated by the University of Mondragon in the Basque Country. The Basque Country is well known for the so-called Mondragon cooperative model, which has been built since the mid-1950s.. It is currently made up of 95 separate, autonomous cooperatives, around 81 000 employees and 14 research and development centres, and is ranked first in the Basque Country and tenth in Spain in the business classification. Cooperatives use democratic methods in their business organisation, with the objectives of employment, personal and professional development of workers and community development

During the project, we observed a lot of cooperative activities in Finland. At Haaga-Helia we visited a few learning labs, such as Taseco, which is built around the cooperative model. In addition, entrepreneurship courses at the specialisation level teach students the basics of the cooperative model. When we asked students and teachers what they knew about social entrepreneurship, hardly anyone could explain it.    Social entrepreneurship is associated with organizations whose primary objective is not to maximise profit, but to have a strong will to do more than is necessary for society. Social enterprises often operate on a cooperative basis. However, social entrepreneurship can be practised in all types of enterprises.

The role of higher education institutions is to equip students with the knowledge and skills to actively participate in the world of work and solve the complex problems facing humanity today. We challenge teachers to explore and reflect on how social cooperative entrepreneurship can be integrated into teaching and learning, so that students understand the different opportunities to contribute to society.