The 5th Consortium meeting was co-hosted jointly by Universitas Brawijaya and STIE Malangkucecwara in Malang. The main purpose of the meeting was to evaluate the progress of the implementation of the business incubator programme, following on from a two-day business incubation workshop led by the University of Innsbruck under the leadership of GITA Steering Committee member Alexander Knapp. The Consortium also visited the already operating business incubation unit at Universitas Brawijaya and had the opportunity to provide one-to-one consulting sessions to student entrepreneurs showcasing their start-ups.
On the second day of the project meeting, STIE Malangkucecwara, or Kampus ABM, inaugurated their local Growth Hub under the name “ABM Hub”. With only sixty members of academic staff and approximately 2,500 students, STIE secured an eight year grant in recent years for training local SMEs and is fostering, through its lecturing staff, around two hundred SME communities as well as thirty villages which have particular economic potential. Around twenty percent of the institutions’ alumni choose to be entrepreneurs, but there has been a need to develop an effective entrepreneurial infrastructure combining entrepreneurship education, business engagement and start-up support. Alumni Fourizki Johan and Fernanda Fenandhytia who both graduated with an undergraduate degree in Accounting were delighted with the developments at their university. They said “The opening of the Growth Hub is great! We wish it had existed whilst we were still students. Many of our friends are aspiring entrepreneurs and would have benefited so much from a facility like this one”.
