Our H2020 project START2ACT has now completed the first of its three years. This past period was all about preparing the START2ACT support programme on Energy Efficiency to people at young SMEs and startups - all public outcomes of this period have been collected and provided here.
The upcoming project period has been launched with an event of major importance for the START2ACT members: The Training of Trainers on the 28. – 30.03.2017 in London.
All 11 partner companies of the consortium met in the British capital and spent three days together to receive training sessions from our START2ACT Energy Experts Carbon Trust, our startup ecosystem insiders startups.be and finally on the third day to close the meeting days with a general project assembly.
The Training of Trainers concept
The two Training of Trainers sessions aimed at educating the project partners in rolling out two of the START2ACT Energy Efficiency activities, namely on-site consultancy for SMEs and mentoring for startups, in the nine participating START2ACT countries. As the partners are all energy agencies and consultancy companies active in the energy efficiency field, they are now well prepared to support the two START2ACT target groups, young SMEs and startups.
Lucy Hunt, Paul McKinney and the team from the Carbon Trust delivered the first day Training of Trainers for the Energy Efficiency support to young SMEs. Within the START2ACT consultancy programme, the national partners will provide a free of charge, tailor-made support programme to young SMEs in order to understand and increase energy efficiency, and thereby help boost the companies’ potential to save energy and costs.
Diana Pati from Startups.be provided on the second day the Training of Trainers for the Energy Efficiency support programme to startups. One of the often-emphasised points during this training session was that startups often have very limited resources for additional topics outside of their original business scope. However, if once embraced an energy conscious company mindset and put this statement at the outset of their value proposition, any startup may boost its position to enter the market. Thus, the START2ACT startup mentoring programme will employ an innovative and lean structure to support startups in energy efficiency.
Influence the future business landscape - replicable strategy across Europe
Moreover, START2ACT seeks at transferring its amassed knowledge to other parties in Europe and beyond who might also be interested in assisting young SMEs and startups in adopting a more energy efficient behaviour. For this reason, the training kits (curriculum for the training) as well as manuals (instructions for the trainer) and handbooks (step-by-step guidance to roll out the support programmes) both for SMEs and startups have been published in the Results and downloads section of the START2ACT web page.
At START2ACT we are dedicated to supporting the players of our future European business landscape towards becoming more energy efficient – we are happy to hear your opinions and try and answer your questions no matter if you are coming from a young SME, a startup or wanting to adopt the training strategy.