New Entrepreneur (NE)
Name & surname: Costanza Ceoloni
Country: Italy
Age: 30 years
Sector of activity: Consulting
Did you already start your business?
Name of business/website: EU for you
What is your future business? “EU for you” will be a service company offering consulting services in the field of European Policies and funding programmes, both to the public and to the private sectors.
Host Entrepreneur (HE)
Name & surname: Giuseppe Saija
Country: Belgium
Sector of activity: Business consulting
Experience in running a business: 21 years
Name of business/website: euknow / www.euknow.eu
Period of exchange: 23/07/2020 – 18/11/2020
Duration of exchange: 4 months
How did experienced entrepreneur Giuseppe Saija benefit from his collaboration with new entrepreneur Costanza Ceoloni with regards to his consulting business?
Costanza Ceoloni (the NE) was interested in developing consulting services to the industry and other stakeholders of the local economy (the area of Vicenza, where she comes from has a high industrial density) mainly in her region (Veneto) in the north of Italy. She got in contact with euknow, a Brussels based company, which provides such type of assistance to industrial enterprises. She wanted to get acquainted with its processes concerning their approach to clients and in the development of offers, mainly related to accessing funds from European institutions within the Horizon 2020 framework (in the future Horizon Europe programme). Before the collaboration, Costanza and the staff of euknow worked on defining a programme for the transfer of knowledge, based in part on a short formal training at her arrival, and mostly on her contribution to the company’s work under real work conditions. The idea was to allow her to go back to Italy with sufficient tools to develop her business there.
Due to the Covid-19 situation, Costanza was able to join euknow only on the 23rd of July 2020. She was immediately updated on the current activities of the company and familiarized with its ongoing work, especially with regards to the planning of new offers to actual and to potential clients both in short and long terms. For short-term activities, she was entrusted with offers related to assistance with new proposals under the upcoming New Green Deal call of the Horizon 2020 programme, especially regarding innovation in the building sector. She was further partially assigned to support a proposal under development in the same area at the time of her arrival. In the long-term, she was involved in internal discussions on the development of a new type of offer, especially for the facilitation of industrial clusters on the Italian market, which could eventually become a basis for collaboration in the future.
Even with the limitations imposed by the Covid pandemic (two of our staff members were most of the time not in Brussels while Costanza was here and we had to shift to a 90% remote work modality in the last month), the internship proved beneficial both to Costanza and to the company. Costanza was exposed to principles regarding not just the development of commercial offers but also the construction of a trust relationship with the client, which is fundamental in consulting activities. She was also trained in backing consulting support with communication and social media. Costanza’s insights based on her background knowledge of the industry in her region were also useful to us – to reason about ways of adapting our offers to the needs of mainly small and medium enterprises.
Concluding Remarks
Costanza Ceoloni (NE): “I greatly appreciated the availability of the CEO and other colleagues to provide advice and very open feedback at all levels of our common activities. I felt integrated within their team since the start and went back home with stimulating ideas and useful experience.”
Giuseppe Saija (HE): “Having a new entrepreneur with us was a nice and refreshing experience. We started seeing things with a new perspective, especially in relation to the expectations of startups and very small companies. It was great, even within the limitations imposed by the Covid emergency.”