During the last decades the movement towards environmentally responsible enterprises is growing worldwide and the Lisbon Agenda clearly proposes that innovation and development should go hand in hand with the protection of the environment. Many studies have shown that the adoption of “greener practices” and the design of environmental friendly processes, products and services contribute to enterprise competitiveness in many ways, including more business opportunities, cost reduction, improvement of enterprise’s image, marketing advantage and the creation of healthy workplaces. It is also with no doubt that when SMEs are attempting to initiate such Green Business activities, an important set of skills and competences in the field is required. Based on the rationale that a “green business is a smart business”, green business training programmes are considered necessary in order to effectively support enterprises in the integration and management of environmentally-friendly practices.

The project is designed to address the needs and involve SMEs owners and senior managers, procurement and HR managers, Green Business consultants, as well as VET professionals, public authorities’ executives, policy makers and practitioners in the field.

Although green entrepreneurship provides many advantages to the SMEs there is only limited number of enterprises who have been able to follow the trend towards growing concern for the environment. Indeed the surveys show that only 1% of the SMEs use alternative energy sources. This can be justified as:

• The majority of entrepreneurs have poor knowledge in the field of green entrepreneurship.
• There is a lack of wide range organized awareness raising campaigns.
• There is limited access to information and relevant training material.

In response to the limited, or lack of, environmental business support, the project focuses on the delivery of a personalized “Green Training Programme”, aiming to improve the knowledge and the skills of entrepreneurs and professionals related to the effective introduction and management of green business practices. 

One of the basic aims is to attract small to medium sized enterprises that will realize the importance of “green” business as a critical factor for their competitiveness and growth. These SMEs shall be voluntarily involved in almost all the lifetime of the project and they will acquire a unique experience and know how to do business in “Green”. The project plans to involve a large number of SMEs for the conduct of the training needs surveys and invite them to participate to the Pilot Training. The GoGreen project will focus to various SMEs from various sectors willing to transform their business to Green Entrepreneurships.

Special GoGreen bureaus will be established inside the Chambers that will participate for the exploitation and sustainability of the projects outputs.

In order to raise awareness and create a sustainable multistakeholder network the project will be organized in a way that involves the following steps:

• Analysis of the knowledge gap: through surveys in all the participating countries and field research;
• Description of Methodological, Educational and Technological requirements for the training: Training Model;
• Preparation of training material and technological infrastructure (GoGreen Resource Center);
• Linguistic and Cultural Localisation: the e-learning Platform communication interface will be localized in Greek, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Bulgarian and Spanish, together with the contents of the training modules; and,
• Pilot testing and evaluation of the Training Programme: both “Training of Trainers” and “Workshops and Trainees Seminars”.

Furthermore, targeted transversal Dissemination and Exploitation of the project results is planned and a special detailed Exploitation Plan will be elaborated to achieve maximum impact.

From the planning point of view, the project is articulated into relevant Work Packages, which on their turn are articulated in Tasks allocated among the partners. According to each partner’s area of expertise.