According the Government of Western Australia, 97% of businesses are classified as small, with a share of 25% as micro (1-4 staff) and 10% small (5-19 staff), in numbers, 78.000 companies employ between 1-19 staff members. These combined contribute to 40 bn to the economy, and 20% to the gross state product (see [here]). In contrast to large scale corporations, SMEs require students with broader skill sets and graduate attributes than larger scale corporations. Due to mostly limited available resources, for these companies it is rather hard to collaborate with universities in teaching and research. To overcome this shortcoming, CuCo.Create (C3) aims to identify a model to co-create with SMEs and integrate these into a teaching environment to gain access to future employees, the creative talent of students, or which help them to become entrepreneurs. the project has three primary goals:
- the importance of making students ready for SMEs or self-employment;
- necessity of developing soft-skills and employability attributes;
- innovative approaches in cross-disciplinary work.
The goal of the project is to train students in broad skills to make them ready for SME applicability and self-entrepreneurship by 1) developing teaching methods to cover these soft/employability skills; 2) creation of a model framework for similar kinds of undertakings of Curtin university; 3) establishing a Curtin wide expert group.
