The Annette von Droste-Huelshoff Gymnasium in Düsseldorf has started the Entrepreneur-Under 21 Club (E-U21 Club) for Year 12 Students that participate in the pilot program Entrepreneur@School, an initiative from NPO YouCan Trust, implemented in 2009.

Entrepreneur@School is aimed at preparing students for the workplace of the future, a future that in some organizations has already arrived. With traditional jobs becoming scarce, this program encourages young people to learn entrepreneurial skills (finding business opportunities, analysis, decision making, communicating, marketing, product design, and creating competent teams of collaborators) combined with the latest technologies on the market now, such as search engines, social networking, wikis, blogs (text and video), collaborative software, and Web 2.0 to 4.0 technologies.

The E-U21 Club has announced that it will take part in the Focus Magazine Competition called “WE 2010 – Think Future, Take Responsibility!”, using the Entrepreneur@School program as its entry. The competition is aimed at discovering ideas and programs that will have a profound effect on our society in the near future.

The E-U21 Club believes that its entry will revolutionize the field of education, shifting the focus from teaching to learning, turning teachers from disseminators of information to mentors, facilitators, and managers of learning environments. Students will both collaborate and compete, honing their communication and presentation skills, and focus on projects in traditional and social entrepreneurship to make a living while simultaneously addressing social, technical, environmental, and economic issues that affect societies now and in the future.

Of major importance in both the program and the Focus Competition is the emphasis on taking responsibility, the idea that young people have a stake in creating their own as well as their society’s future, and should not rely on parents or governments to formulate the future for them, but become actively involved.

To select the winners of the Competition, the Focus jury will evaluate the content and ideas of the entry, its practical relevance, how well the live presentation was made, and how effective the website of the participating team is to convey the message of the project in clear and easily understandable terms.

Teams selected for the live presentation in Berlin will be announced in early April 2010. The winner will be chosen from the 20 teams that will present.

The E-U21 Club is inviting parents, teachers, companies, and anyone interested in supporting the Club, financially or in kind, to contact! Corporations are invited to adopt the Entrepreneur@School program and the E-U21 Club as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Please contact ….. for further information!

Düsseldorf, February 2010