Entrepreneurship in The Open Future programme
We encourage children to be enterprising and to have the courage to change their surroundings. Through their own projects, they come up with concrete ideas for the development of their region.
Open Future equips children with key life skills—from problem-solving and communication to independent decision-making. It teaches them to turn their own ideas into tangible benefits for the community, while naturally fostering empathy, openness, and a desire to actively engage with the world around them.
Schools often lack the resources to foster entrepreneurship, creativity, or initiative, even though these are qualities that are crucial for life and future careers. Today, employers are looking for people who aren’t afraid to explore the world around them, come up with their own ideas, and have the courage to turn them into real solutions.
How do we encourage entrepreneurship in the Future OTHER programme?
In the development of entrepreneurship within the programme, we assume that entrepreneurship is one of the basic characteristics that children can apply in their future and in whatever they do. It will help them to become those who can recognise or create challenges and opportunities. This allows them to come up with their own projects, bring them to life and take responsibility for them. That is why social innovation has become a core element of the Open Future curriculum. This is a goal that every participant in any form should achieve. By working on innovation, he develops his entrepreneurial skills while also developing other digital and soft skills (other learning areas of the programme).
In developing the entrepreneurship curriculum, we took the European EntreComp Competency Framework for Entrepreneurship as a basis and divided the individual competencies into the three years of the programme.
Self-Awareness and Self-Efficacy
From the very beginning, we lay a solid foundation for children’s worlds. We help children recognize their own worth—discovering their strengths, personal motivations, and areas where they can grow. We look for what they genuinely enjoy and what ignites a spark within them, because it is precisely this inner interest that serves as the best foundation for everything they will pursue in life.
Identifying Problems and Finding Solutions
Building on this foundation, we foster an entrepreneurial mindset. We teach children to perceive and closely observe the world around them—to notice things that could be done better and to have the courage to point them out. We encourage their natural curiosity, interest in their surroundings, and a proactive approach to coming up with their own ideas and solutions.
Ethical and sustainable thinking
We place the topics we explore within a broader context. We engage children in discussions about key social issues. We teach them to view the world in terms of its interconnections and to understand how the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of our lives are naturally intertwined.
Communication Skills and Creativity
The development of creativity and communication skills is the common thread that runs through our entire program. We start by building soft skills and gradually build on them with practical entrepreneurial competencies—we teach children how to communicate clearly with their future target audience, understand the basics of marketing, innovate creatively, and develop meaningful designs.
Putting It into Practice
We then integrate all the skills acquired into a cohesive creative process. We build on the problems the children have identified themselves and sensitively guide them through the creation of their own project—from finding solutions to testing them and verifying their effectiveness in practice.
We guide them toward deep empathy for the people for whom they are creating solutions, so that the resulting projects are truly useful, valuable, and have a real impact. In this way, the children go through the entire process all the way to implementation, during which they learn to mobilize resources and bring their ideas to life. They are not alone on this journey—they are supported by coordinators who are happy to share their expertise with them.