EFMD award goes to “Human Knowledge” with SDA Bocconi

Taking the person as the measure of doing business, creating value for your community, learning from past mistakes and looking to the future with confidence, with sustainability, circular economy and the energetic transition encompassing all of it. This is neither a dream nor a program manifesto, but a specific training project. Not just any project but the finalist one in EFMD Excellence in Practice Award 2021, in the “Social and Environmental Impact” category. We are referring to Joule’s Human Knowledge Program (HKP). Joule is Eni per l’impresa’s free school, calling on top-of-the-line partners, business schools and academic contexts like SDA Bocconi to provide new Italian entrepreneurs and startuppers with the business skills and methods they need to achieve sustainable growth for their companies and their country.

The European Foundation for Management Development is a non-profit organization with over 960 members in 90 countries: universities, business schools, companies and public institutions. The award-winning project was created within Joule, Eni’s Scuola per l’impresa, in order to train and empower emerging entrepreneurs (any age, background or experience) on topics related to environmental sustainability, the energetic transition and corporate social responsibility.

The project started with a context analysis of Italian startups: there is still a lot to do to improve gender equality (only 18% of startuppers are women), type and grade of education (just 28% are university graduates and 20% have a managerial training background), and the same applies to age (43 is their average age). The aim of ENI’s program is to reduce these gaps by including more women, making education more accessible to entrepreneurs who have no academic or managerial background, and accelerating the process to lower the average age.

HKP learning project developed along two lines: a 6-month Blended journey, combining virtual and on-campus classes, was attended by 25 young talents between 18 and 39 years of age (selected out of about 2,300 applicants) with a monthly grant; and an Open full distance-learning journey, accessible to anybody free of charge, with a totally innovative interactive methodological approach. The latter provides a growth experience guiding you through your entrepreneurial evolution via an Engage, Act and Learn formula. In this context a web series tells the story of two young startuppers experiencing all the difficulties associated with starting a business, and offers a wealth of information and advice in the form of effective and engaging “pills”.

Startup accelerator Energizer completes Joule’s Human Knowledge program, helping sustainable startups improve their long-term impact by reducing carbon emissions and creating circular economies to fight climate change, right from the outset.

Our Human Knowledge Program aims at transforming the Italian entrepreneurial environment in the long run, but our Open Program has already achieved some important results in terms of being:

• inclusive: there was a balance among our more than 8,000 participants as to gender, geography and interests;
• engaging: over 2,800 participants completed at least one module and the average amount of credits achieved to access upper levels was 300 (minimum required was 80);
• impacting on people: entrepreneurial ideas emerging during the Program had strong visibility and participants created a new vision of the future for themselves;
• impacting on companies: around 60 projects were submitted for Joule4Ideas, an incubating program designed to develop the ideas deemed most innovative;
• impacting on society: training was aimed at environmental and social sustainability.

These outcomes are in line with Joule’s mission to train and support entrepreneurs who want to grow and help their country grow, in a sustainable manner.

SDA Bocconi School of Management.