This paper aims to show how current insights on place branding are used to organize “green” entrepreneurship in the Dutch Utrechtse Heuvelrug region. The role of place is explored in establishing a differentiated meaning for green entrepreneurship and providing an inspirational source for innovations, resulting in a green economic value proposition designed and communicated through branding. Design/methodology/approach: From the literature, different perspectives on the role and function of the place were derived, which lead to the choice of an identity-based entrepreneurial brand. To define the regional identity, qualitative and quantitative research were conducted. In addition, co-creation sessions were organized to further develop the brand. Findings: Taking place branding as the starting point, a framework has been developed, introducing the regional identity as an open space, linking locally based sub-brands to enhance power. To deliver economical and social value in an area with no leading business to sustainability and well-developed business skills, cluster development has been introduced as a way to create new economic activity and sustainable impact. Practical implications: The strategy of separating stakeholders and position them as locally based brands enables place planners and marketers to manage place brand complexity, which generally delays the process, often limiting place branding to “logos and slogans”. Originality/value: This paper provides a case study, which offers new perspectives on the issue of managing complexity, which is inevitable in organizing a place brand.
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The relevance of an internationalised home curriculum for all students is generally acknowledged. Other than study abroad, the home curriculum gives programs of study full control over the way students learn international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives. However, misconceptions, lack of strategies, lack of skills of academics, and lack of connection between stakeholders present major obstacles to internationalising teaching and learning “at home”. The practical trajectory outlined in this chapter presents programs of study with the opportunity to focus on employability skills instead of on a semantic discussion on internationalisation. By linking this orientation on employability skills with the articulation of intended learning outcomes (ILOs), a pathway for developing employability skills in all students will be created. Within this pathway, international, intercultural, interdisciplinary, and future-focused dimensions serve to enhance students’ acquiring employability skills. The trajectory presented here evolved out of action research on internationalisation with academics. During the action research, taking employability skills as a starting point emerged as an enabler for the internationalisation process. It helped to overcome lengthy and semantic discussions on the meaning of internationalisation. After that, international and intercultural dimensions are included in these employability skills. These skills are then translated into ILOs. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in Internationalization and employability in higher education on 19/25/06, available online: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351254885.
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Teachers have a crucial role in bringing about the extensive social changes that are needed in the building of a sustainable future. In the EduSTA project, we focus on sustainability competences of teachers. We strengthen the European dimension of teacher education via Digital Open Badges as means of performing, acknowledging, documenting, and transferring the competencies as micro-credentials. EduSTA starts by mapping the contextual possibilities and restrictions for transformative learning on sustainability and by operationalising skills. The development of competence-based learning modules and open digital badge-driven pathways will proceed hand in hand and will be realised as learning modules in the partnering Higher Education Institutes and badge applications open for all teachers in Europe.Societal Issue: Teachers’ capabilities to act as active facilitators of change in the ecological transition and to educate citizens and workforce to meet the future challenges is key to a profound transformation in the green transition.Teachers’ sustainability competences have been researched widely, but a gap remains between research and the teachers’ practise. There is a need to operationalise sustainability competences: to describe direct links with everyday tasks, such as curriculum development, pedagogical design, and assessment. This need calls for an urgent operationalisation of educators’ sustainability competences – to support the goals with sustainability actions and to transfer this understanding to their students.Benefit to society: EduSTA builds a community, “Academy of Educators for Sustainable Future”, and creates open digital badge-driven learning pathways for teachers’ sustainability competences supported by multimodal learning modules. The aim is to achieve close cooperation with training schools to actively engage in-service teachers.Our consortium is a catalyst for leading and empowering profound change in the present and for the future to educate teachers ready to meet the challenges and act as active change agents for sustainable future. Emphasizing teachers’ essential role as a part of the green transition also adds to the attractiveness of teachers’ work.
The transition to a circular, resource efficient construction sector is crucial to achieve climate neutrality in 2050. Construction stillaccounts for 50% of all extracted materials, is responsible for 3% of EU’s waste and for at least 12% of Green House Gas emissions.However, this transition is lagging, the impact of circular building materials is still limited.To accelerate the positive impact of circulair building materials Circular Trust Building has analyzed partners’ circular initiatives andidentified 4 related critical success factors for circularity, re-use of waste, and lower emissions:1. Level of integration2. Organized trust3. Shared learning4. Common goalsScaling these success factors requires new solutions, skills empowering stakeholders, and joint strategies and action plans. Circular TrustBuilding will do so using the innovative sociotechnical transition theory:1.Back casting: integrating stakeholders on common goals and analyzing together what’s needed, what’s available and who cancontribute what. The result is a joint strategy and xx regional action plans.2.Agile development of missing solutions such a Circular Building Trust Framework, Regional Circular Deals, connecting digitalplatforms matching supply and demand3.Increasing institutional capacity in (de-)construction, renovation, development and regulation: trained professionals move thetransition forward.Circular Trust Building will demonstrate these in xx pilots with local stakeholders. Each pilot will at least realize a 25% reduction of thematerial footprint of construction and renovation
The Dutch floriculture is globally leading, and its products, knowledge and skills are important export products. New challenges in the European research agenda include sustainable use of raw materials such as fertilizer, water and energy, and limiting the use of pesticides. Greenhouse growers however have little control over crop growth conditions in the greenhouse at individual plant level. The purpose of this project, ‘HiPerGreen’, is to provide greenhouse owners with new methods to monitor the crop growth conditions in their greenhouse at plant level, compare the measured growth conditions and the measured growth with expected conditions and expected growth, to point out areas with deviations, recommend counter-measures and ultimately to increase their crop yield. The main research question is: How can we gather, process and present greenhouse crop growth parameters over large scale greenhouses in an economical way and ultimately improve crop yield? To provide an answer to this question, a team of university researchers and companies will cooperate in this applied research project to cover several different fields of expertise The application target is floriculture: the production of ornamental pot plants and cut flowers. Participating companies are engaged in the cultivation of pot plans, flowers and suppliers of greenhouse technology. Most of the parties fall in the SME (MKB) category, in line with the RAAK MKB objectives.Finally, the Demokwekerij and Hortipoint (the publisher of the international newsletter on floriculture) are closely involved. The project will develop new knowledge for a smart and rugged data infrastructure for growth monitoring and growth modeling in the greenhouse. In total the project will involve approximately 12 (teacher) researchers from the universities and about 60 students, who will work in the form of internships and undergraduate studies of interesting questions directly from the participating companies.
