The Experiment

In recent years, the issue of encouraging and developing entrepreneurship among young people in Europe has attracted more and more attention, also due to a changing world of work marked by the rise of new technologies.

For their life at work, young people are looking for autonomy, balance between professional and personal life, recognition, projects that make sense in a changing world. Hence, their growing attraction towards the cooperative entrepreneurship model based on horizontal relationships and resources pooling. .

In this context, since the end of 2015, the French Confederation of worker cooperatives (called “Scop” in France), has been engaged in a European project ERASMUS + aimed to offer an online center of educational resources for 15/20 year olds and their teachers. This ambitious project involves the School for Social Economy in Andalusia (Spain); the cooperative vocation training Irecoop (Emilia-Romagna, Italy); the magazine Alternatives Economiques (France), and the European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives (CECOP-CICOPA Europe).

Completely free and open source, the tools produced in the framework of the project are based on an the “learning by doing” methodology: learning while creating a “coopworking enterprise”.

In the framework of the CoopLab project, we mean by “coopworking enterprises” the main types of cooperatives where the workers can be also owners and co-managers of the enterprise (worker-members), namely worker cooperatives and social cooperatives.