THIS PROJECT HAS ENDED

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Project duration

9 November 2021 – 9 November 2024

Project contract

The Early Warning Europe Mentor Academy (EWEMA) was an initiative of the EU, under the contract EASME/2021/OP/0001 “Improving the Availability and the Scope of Services for Companies in Financial Difficulties”.  The service contract was awarded to the AARC Consortium. It was funded by the European Union (EU).

Contracting Authority: European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA).

Project implementation

The project was successfully undertaken by the AARC Consortium:

AARC Consultancy (Ireland) experienced EU project leader, Erhvervshus Midtjylland (Denmark) lead partner of Early Warning in Denmark and of the EU-funded Early Warning Europe initiative, and Fundacja Firmy Rodzinne (Poland), pilot partner in the Early Warning Europe project from 2016-2019.

Project objectives

The general objective of the EWEMA project was to improve the availability and the scope of services for companies that are at risk of facing insolvency, across EU Member States and third countries participating in the COSME programme.

The six specific objectives were:

• Facilitating and accelerating the deployment of early warning services for companies in financial difficulties across the EU, contributing to shortening the time for building up fully-fledged service provision and effective operation.
• Ensuring the exchange of expertise among mentors experienced in providing services to companies in distress and rolling it out to potential new mentors from countries with less experience in this field, through organising cross-national peer-learning workshops.
• Enhancing the knowledge and expertise of mentors to deliver tailored services for companies in distress through a modular learning programme focusing on building more resilient companies and on knowledge sharing.
• Enabling cross-European dissemination and transfer of best practice in enhancing the skills of mentors to provide the entrepreneurs in distress with a customised and impartial diagnosis and advice, and to help them future-proof their companies.
• Linking the mentors providing services to companies in financial difficulties with the wider community of business support networks providing different types of services to entrepreneurs. This will facilitate the creation of a peer-learning community of practice and enhance the overall competences on how to support entrepreneurs in difficulty.
• Raising awareness of the need for constant improvement of the capacity to provide comprehensive services to companies in distress, to be achieved through increasing the capacity of mentors and defining new best practice.

The main outputs of the project were:

• Research on past and existing training programmes/modules for mentors of companies in financial distress, identifying best practices, and recording educational material. The research is published and accessible here:
  Resilience in action - Publications Office of the EU
• Nine peer-learning workshops
• EWEMA Learning Programme
  This learning programme has been transferred to the EU Academy platform to be publicly available as a course on Early Warning Mentoring for SMEs for interested course takers: Go to the EU Academy
• Six course runs of the Learning Programme including live, facilitated masterclasses online.
• a set of Recommendations to improve the business mentoring landscape in Europe so as to foster a ‘rescue and second chance’ culture that supports entrepreneurship and sustains viable SMEs.
• Community of Practice
  As a sustainability mechanism to ensure continued progress and wider dissemination of EWEMA’s achievements, the project has brought together an initial corps of mentors and organisations to form a virtual community of practice (CoP). The CoP is envisaged to grow organically as its benefits become evident to persons in the members’ professional networks.

The short- and long-term values to member are multiple.

For business support organisations:

• problem-solving and helping SMEs in the orbit of the relevant organisation avoid insolvency.
• add their perspectives on problems faced by the relevant organisation.
• inspiring the organisation in its strategic decision making.
• crisis mentoring / Early Warning assistance services enhances the value of the service portfolio offered by the organisation.
• the organisation may learn about frequent problems and their solutions from the hands-on experience gained by the mentors in their work with the SMEs.
• these experiences will enable the organisation to improve its planning capacity by using the newly acquired knowledge about its market.

For mentors:

• draw on expert knowledge of specialists and other mentors thereby grow as professionals.
• join an organisational setup that addresses their daily needs for administration, logistics, communication, information technology, capacity building, etc.
• be part of a group of colleagues and get a feeling of team spirit.
• a forum for developing skills and providing input to strategic developments
• the initial mentor group will be able to expand by involving new persons and training them using the EWEMA modular learning programme.