By encouraging young people in the archipelago, developing and training their entrepreneurial skills and giving them a positive attitude towards entrepreneurship, you strengthen the region in a long-term perspective. You show them different ways to make a living.
 
The RIBS project involved more than 1000 young people in the ages of 12-18 years in sparely populated archipelago areas in Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Åland.
 
Thanks to different activities, the young people trained their creativity and language skills, developed business ideas, got opportunities to learn from each other in different regions and from experts in different fields.
The methods were:

• 158 local workshops and courses involving 42 schools and youth centres, where business ideas were created and collected
• six international camps, where 30-40 young people worked in small cross-border groups, developing these ideas further
• 36 small-scale cross-border exchanges for students, teachers, and coaches
• the Get the Deal competition with real business challenges to tackle

 
The main result of the project was students’ improved knowledge about entrepreneurship: they gained information about different phases of business development and worked on specific business cases to develop new and innovative strategies for future development of real existing companies. The project exceeded the number of participants in local entrepreneurship knowledge events, but fewer participated in youth exchange and in international workshops than planned, and the amount of joint student companies/business simulations according to programme description was not established.
 
The regional Get the Deal concept was turned into an international competition that works as a model on how to establish cross-border cooperation in the field of entrepreneurship. The developed curriculum and course materials for development of students’ entrepreneurship skills are free of use.
 
The cross-border value of RIBS was obvious for the participating youth by face-to-face communication and joint activities with students from different countries and different cultural backgrounds. Some side-effects are the increased self-confidence among the participants, the friendship and relations, the network and cross-border meetings between youth and adults.
 
“RIBS has been a part of my choice of gymnasium program. Meeting young people with the same interest as me through RIBS has been very inspiring and has helped me to overcome some things that does not come natural to me. Like standing on the stage, presenting something for an audience. I know a lot more about entrepreneurship today, and I’ve learned a lot about my own capacity."