Talents and Skills
Available languages: EN
Time needed: 1-2 hours
STS
LI1
LI2
This tool allows the participants to reflect on, verbalize and share the talents and skills they possess and are applying in the development of their business idea. It is a useful exercise both for the member of the teams and the tutors that are developing the incubation programme. For the first one it is important to understand how much they know about the other members of the teams and how their skills and abilities are effectively applied in the project development.
For the second ones, the tutors, this exercise is important to understand the weakness of the project in terms of endogenous development possibility and the dynamics of relationships, control and interaction that exists in each of the teams. A tool used for this exercise can be a worksheet where participants fill in their own skills into a visual ‘basket’ that represents what they possess and another worksheet that shows the ‘superhero skills’ of the team around them, if they could choose any skills they would deem necessary.
Requirements to make the best out of the material
The presentation of the skills and ability could be done individually or in a cross way. In the second one, each member of a team do not present their own skills and talents but the ones of another member of the same team. In this way is possible also to test how each teams is aware of its potential and how much they know about the other components of the team.
How to use this tool
This session should be held at the beginning of the programme. It is important to firstly clarify the difference between skill and talents (see downloadable slide) using also some examples. Each member of the team should also be able to present concrete examples of how he/she have applied skills or talent in a concrete situation of life. This tool could be used with the set of slides “Basic entrepreneurship” (downloadable at this link) that introduce, using a simple engaging team game, a research of the Kauffman Foundation that identify the 6 key attitudes recognized as the most effective and important to be a successful entrepreneur.
Expected outcome
This sessions helps participants to understand better what could be their role in the project development and to deeply comprehend attitudes, skills and talents of each of the members of the teams. Expected outcomes for this session are that participants are aware of the competencies needed for the establishment of their business, come to realize which of these they already possess and what others might be held by someone else that could support or work for them. This then allows participants to plan concrete steps about who to contact and involve in their project in the future and would give them more tangible understanding of who could take on the next steps and how. It can also be a very encouraging and reaffirming in terms of the self reflection participants do as part of this session.
This tool is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
