An Interview with Junior Achievement Eutope - Assignment Example

Article Summary and Critique EXECUTIVE SUMMARY An Interview with Junior Achievement Europe This article explains the efforts that educators in Europe put in teaching entrepreneurship on the K-12 level. It also outlines some reasons why the efforts of incorporating entrepreneurial and business education on K-12 level are more advanced in Europe than in USA. The article uses a dialogue between ACTE and DF to achieve this. DF explains about Junior Achievement-Young Enterprise (JA-YE) Europe which educates and inspires young people in Europe to attain good achievements in the global economy.

The article explains that JA-YE is the European arm of JA which operates worldwide and targets more than 10 million students across the world every year. The organization teaches children in primary school to early university or college about entrepreneurship. This introduces young people into the business world and raises the confidence of young people who are entering the job market. One way that the organisation and educators in Europe use to inspire and empower young people to become enterprising and entrepreneurial is through Social Innovation Camp which is an intensive program that enables students from various schools in Europe to generate ideas and collaborate through appropriate engagement and collaboration techniques (BusinessAccent.com, 2009).

This program is supported by various institutions in Europe including European Commission. It features 100 national finalists’ students in their national camps. The participants are students from vocational schools in Europe. The creativity of students are seen in their innovative projects e.g. a project that involved a fair that was aimed at bringing together people from different cultures to engage in a new job, a TV channel focused on jobs and a career section on Facebook. CRITIQUE An Interview with Junior Achievement Europe From the summary of the article, it is clear that Europe is progressing successfully in raising young entrepreneurs and promoting innovation and creativity among young people.

DF who is explaining about Junior Achievement Europe says that the entrepreneurship training and development programs for young people in Europe enables young people to turn business ideas from concepts to realities (BusinessAccent.com, 2009). This indicates that the future of business will be improved because young people develop innovative and creative skills from the time they are young. Therefore, it will lead to improved business innovations and developments in future. The article also explains that social innovation camps give students from different vocational schools in Europe an opportunity to advance in terms of business innovations and entrepreneurship.

The social innovation camps bring together about 100 students from 14 countries in Europe. This does not only boost the innovativeness and creativity of students but also enhances good interaction and socialization among the students. As a result, young people learn to develop good interpersonal and oral communication skills which are important skills in the business world (Haftendorn & Salzano, 2003). It also enables them to share their experiences, knowledge and skills; hence sharpening their innovativeness and creativity in business and entrepreneurship issues.

The interaction of young people from various parts of Europe also enables them to share their cultures and appreciate each other’s different cultural backgrounds. This will be important for them in the business world in future. In this regard, Europe has succeeded in developing the skills of good entrepreneurs and effective workforce of the future (BusinessAccent.com, 2009). Furthermore, Europe is able to develop a pool of effective business managers, and their multinational corporations in future may be run by the best managers to outdo other world competitors in the global market.

Educators in Europe have also developed a good way of selecting young students to participate in the social innovation camps (BusinessAccent.com, 2009). The process of selecting students involves choosing national camp finalists to participate in Europe’s camps. Therefore, the best innovative and creative students from each country are chosen to attend the Europe camp. As a result, students work hard to become more innovative in their presentations at the national level in order to meet the standards of the European level.

The business education and entrepreneurship programs of Junior Achievement Europe helps in solving some of the problems people face in Europe and improves life quality of people. For instance, DF suggests that the Junior Achievement program has led to the development of a social idea referred to as “Young Care” in Sweden. This project involved 500 young people who are employed temporarily to visit and provide company to elderly people in nursing homes. This is an innovative, sustainable and scalable business idea which solves a problem faced by elderly people in the real world; hence entrepreneurship education has solved the problems of the people through enhanced creativity and innovation of young people.

From the analysis, it is clear that the article suggests that the Junior Achievement Europe is successful in promoting positive and dependable innovativeness and creativity among young people in the business world. This entrepreneurship training should be developed in US in order to nurture business managers and entrepreneurs who will make use of US resources in future to enhance growth and development of the nation. References list BusinessAccent.com (2009). Business management tip: Directing people in an organization.

Accessed December 4, 2013 from http://businessaccent.com/2009/09/17/business- management-tip-directing-people-in-an-organization/ Haftendorn, K., & Salzano, C. (2003). Facilitating Youth Entrepreneurship: An Analysis of Awareness and Promotion Programmes in Formal and Non-Formal Education, Part 1. Geneva: International Labour Office.