Aim of the project was to build and pilot a new cross-border approach to student empowered company creation with the specific aim of generating new cross-border enterprises in the silver, blue and green economies in the Central Baltic Sea region. The main objective was to create 6 new joint or cooperating cross-border companies.

Project organised hackathons, networking and pitching events to support students’ awareness raising and capacity building for entrepreneurial-minded students. 450 students participated in different events and many of them indicated future aspiration towards entrepreneurship career.

Project faced challenges from Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns had a negative impact on project activities, especially on cross-border cooperation. Project was quite successful in using online tools but students’ commitment to virtual events was not as strong as to physical events. Missing possibility to communicate face-to-face made cooperation harder. Because of that some of the project focus was turned to helping existing startups by giving mentoring services to them. In total 72 enterprises were supported by the project activities.

Project main objective was achieved partly: 7 new start-up companies were created. However, they are not cross-border companies although they indicated plans to expand their activities to other project countries. Intention to work together with somebody from other country was not enough strong and Covid related restrictions had additional negative impact on working across borders.