Plenty of research has been carried out by numerous projects in the past years in order to characterize the transnational entrepreneurship phenomena and to assess the demands and barriers faced by Start-Ups for implementing internationalization strategies. This field of operation has been explored from diverse study areas:
- Literature about transnational entrepreneurs and transnational entrepreneurship skills: studies demonstrate that transnational entrepreneurship, as different to ethnic and migration entrepreneurship is a new recent phenomenon of study in social sciences that need to be analyzed, and specially the processes by which their personal skills and resources provide competitive advantages across multiple institutional contexts.
- Literature about benefits, demands and main barriers of internationalization of firms and, namely of academic spin-offs. However, the studies show that increasingly and due to its main role of developing new technologies and applied sciences, internationalization is of the main via of survival and growth of these ventures. Individual experiences, skills and resources of these entrepreneurs seems equally important and relevant than networks, economic resources and legal and regulatory contexts when explaining the success patterns of internationalization carried out.
- Literature on approaches and methodologies for corporate training: studies demonstrate that traditional training programmes are no longer effective to cover the skills shortages of managers and employees of increasing globalized organizations and new models under corporate learning approach and innovative ICT-based, need to be designed.
- European projects in the previous Lifelong Learning Programme and current Erasmus+ with similar approaches: The review of these and other projects demonstrate that, although there are quite lot projects focusing on promoting entrepreneurial spirit across Europe, they have been focused especially on students, with low level of attention to teachers and enterprise staff, so promoting many advances in the area of University curriculum reform but not in the context of corporate training/corporate learning. Particularly, very few projects focus on Spin-Offs, although they are the current main way of knowledge transfer from University to the business world, as well as a good opportunity to increase the employment of graduates and researchers through the entrepreneurship.
Moreover, projects are still too much focused in improving traditional entrepreneurial skills (negotiation skills, communication skills, etc.) while there is an increasing need to support projects promoting the networking of University entrepreneurs in Europe across disciplines and sectors as well as to training them in the transversal skills needed for the management of transnational business (so called transnational entrepreneurship skills). The few projects that have approached these competences have done this from the perspective of ethnic entrepreneurship with much focus on the intercultural competences.
On the other hand, most projects use traditional methodologies to approach this training (such as workshops, classroom activities, etc.) or e-learning, while that the use of innovative ICT based solutions, such innovative software for webs and tablets need to be explored.
We believe that Lets Guide is an approach, which differentiates itself in this regard.