While any migrant entrepreneurship support scheme is naturally bound to local conditions that strongly vary from region to region, the Community of Practice (CoP)1 of EMEN has analysed and compared a set of good practices on coaching and mentoring with the objective of identifying their unique selling points.
We did that by proposing a methodological framework of four essential categories and eventually also compare features of different support schemes for migrant entrepreneurs.
The strength of this paper lies in the description of outstanding features, such as incentives that seem to be important in comparison to other programmes.
Similarly, this paper provided an analysis of three different business support schemes across Europe, namely TERN (UK), Start-Up Refugee (Finland) and THSN (Germany).
The analysis focused on refugee entrepreneurship, which might not be so different from other ME Support schemes. Each of the cases bears obvious advantages, e.g. idiosyncratic innovations and practices each programme realises.
In a nutshell: Start-Up Refugees is coming from and building on the broader refugee community in Finland. Thus, start-up support is – besides acting as an employment agency – merely one component of their approach. TERN from London has the strongest business approach among the three cases. Consequently, the organisation runs a rather market-oriented incubation programme. Like SUR, they strongly build their community and create strong linkages with i.e. their alumni network, which clearly bears advantages. THSN’s case is surely outstanding in terms of its scope and scale. Due to the exchange between a strong sponsor and its embeddedness in the existing network of Social Impact Labs across Germany, THSN has significant leverage. Methodologically, also considering the focus of the broader THSN-programme, it seems not only to focus on supporting strong entrepreneurs but also on providing orientation and inspiration to clients that have a lower disposition to establish their business.
