The main aim of the project is to strengthen Armenian and Georgian universities’ capacity to provide highly skilled business-oriented engineers to the emerging international markets. Existing knowledge and best practices from Europe will be matched with local business cultures leading to a new concept where also companies actively contribute to the university level engineering education in its all phases: planning and funding, implementation, and assessment of students’ performance.

Main aim of the LISS24 project covers three interlinked specific objectives:

- enhancing B2B Sales and innovation capacity,

through professionalizing B2B sales and innovation training in Bachelor’s and Master’s levels and partially also as in-service training, based on needs of the industry that will recruit the forthcoming business professionals,

- renewing the assessment culture,

through B2B Sales and Innovation Competitions as a quite efficient hands-on approach improving students’ multicultural competences via education to real-life situations and assessing their most intended learning outcomes, in parallel, Sales Labs will become a new value-adding element for the assessment of different types of sales performance and digital marketing.

- increasing private investments to higher education,

through organizing different regional/national showcase events to attract private funding (investors, existing companies) to the student teams. Sales Labs to be set up by the project are potentially providing new business opportunities for universities.

According to the feasibility study as part of the needs analyses, ambitious aims of the LISS24 project are realistic and can be reached thanks to three main factors: 1) Partner countries’ universities have some prior knowledge and expertise on innovation competitions, it is needed when taking next steps; 2) Partner countries’ universities have existing venues - e.g. Innovation Centres that can be utilized also in the LISS24 project. 3) European partners have existing knowledge on organizing innovation competitions and B2B Sales education to engineering students. Additionally, FHWN and Turku UAS with their Sales Labs provide the necessary expertise for setting up the Sales Labs in partner countries.