Creative Spark: Higher Education Enterprise Programme

Creative Spark is a five year initiative to support international university and institutional partnerships to develop enterprise skills and creative economy across seven countries in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan), South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) and Ukraine through UK support. 

In order to support higher education reform and respond to unemployment rates in these seven countries, we will use the UK’s experience to help develop enterprise education. This way we will support over 10,000 students and young entrepreneurs in the first year of the programme.  

The programme has three key elements:

  1. Development of partnerships between universities and creative institutions in the UK and those in programme countries in order to support enterprise education and establish enterprise centres.
  2. Delivering enterprise skills training packages to students and creative entrepreneurs, ranging from pitching ideas and starting a business, to protecting intellectual property and securing credit lines.
  3. Delivering an English learning programme with a range of digital learning content including learning platforms, online courses and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) focused on English for entrepreneurship.

Awarded organisations in Armenia 

In 2018, the British Council funded six Creative Spark partnerships, involving seven universities and creative institutions from Armenia. Awarded organisations and their UK partner institutions implementing projects aimed at supporting the creative economy development are: 

  • Foundation for Armenian Science and Technology - Aston University
  • Armenian National Engineering Laboratories at NPUA - City, University of London, ChangeSchool
  • American University of Armenia - Northumbria University
  • V. Brusov University of Languages and Social Sciences, State Academy of Fine Arts - University of Essex, ChangeSchool
  • National Polytechnic University of Armenia (NPUA) - University of Southampton
  • Simonian Educational Foundation (TUMO Studios) - Norwich University of the Arts
  • Yerevan State University (YSU) - Nottingham Trent University 

Learn more about each of the Armenian-UK institutional partnerships here: 

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