While it is widely acknowledged that an entrepreneurial career path is a viable avenue for employment in the times of economic restructuring, many Central Baltic regions have limited resources and knowhow to support the creation of cross-border companies. The project STARPABS aims at raising awareness and interest towards entrepreneurship among university students and helping them to build international teams around their business ideas. The project will also attract new entrepreneurial talent into the Central Baltic region as well as create a model for supporting creation of student-based international companies.

The project combines competences of higher education programmes, student populations and enterprise development agencies to encourage the best students to take up international entrepreneurship. This is done by organising e.g. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) of entrepreneurship, hackathons and business idea development workshops for students. The training process is based on proven business development models and tools including a business idea competition.

By the end of the project 10-15 new knowledge intensive cross-border companies and 5-6 cooperation agreements have been established. Additionally, wide idea of a student-based entrepreneurial ecosystem is disseminated and a competence and network model is created for supporting the creation and growth of knowledge-intensive cross-border companies in cooperation with universities, enterprise development agencies and private actors.