The best practice in Denmark

Why do we want to encourage female engineers to become entrepreneurs?

• The women’s self-realization – opportunities for women to become whatever they want
• Entrepreneurs promote the individuality and the essence of networking – the two most significant trends in a society of knowledge – and the diversification of society and how we understand growth
• Female engineers who become entrepreneurs on their own terms contribute their specific competence to society

The focus group pointed out the following important elements in encouraging female engineers/students to become entrepreneurs:

Networking, a diversity of pedagogic methods, self-organization, personal motivational power, entrepreneurship as an attitude in the engineering education, changing attitudes, capitalizing one’s own competence, changing our habits of thinking, iterating development processes.

The best practice
The unique business plan

The aim of the course was to make every participant think about their own unique business plan based on this holistic model:

The sun is the attraction and the demanding challenge – You have to find a challenge which is so attractive that you really want to invest time and money in it – and so demanding that it requires creative thinking

You and your enterprise are the tree containing all your unique competence (Where you are)

The river is where you get nutrition, from which you have got your competence, and where time will show what is required to attain your challenge.

Using this proactive model means that you clarify your own motivational power and are forced to discard your habitual thinking. You focus on your competence to choose your product, and afterwards you turn to the market to select the customers, who will value your product.

“The way to go” includes the items of a business plan such as products, customers, selling prices, budgets, marketing and sale drive.

The working process is the DISNEY principle

Working out this business plan is an iterative process using the DISNEY principle. When Disney created his famous cartoons, he split up the work in three phases: Dream, Realization and Criticism, and he and his crew worked repeatedly through the phases. That’s what you do when you work out your business plan, the whole business plan and each item as well.

Checking the status quo of your business plan

Now and then you make a status quo. We used SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).

Pedagogic methods

We used an interactive pedagogy and we were very concerned about the networking between the participants and external networks.

The course was attended by 37 women with very different educational backgrounds – it was held on 15 Thursday evenings so that the women could manage their normal job while preparing their shift to becoming their own managing directors. Now 3 months after the course at least 5 of the women are entrepreneurs and more will follow.

argit Thomsen, MHTConsult, mht@mhtconsult.dk
Marianne Forman, Marianne Forman Aps, marianne.forman@privat.dk
Lise Damkjær, Learning4life, Lise@learning4life.dk