"Establishing a Mediterranean Business Scouting Model" in Practitioners Proceedings of the 2018 University-Industry Interaction Conference: Challenges and Solutions for Fostering Entrepreneurial Universities and Collaborative Innovation.

The RESUME project (www.resumeproject.eu), supported by the European Commission Erasmus+ Program in the framework of the Capacity Building for Higher Education Institutions), aims at developing employability solutions in the Southern Mediterranean countries. The project seeks to strengthen of the relationships between Higher Education and the wider social and economic environment, to enhancing the capacity of Higher Education Institutions to work on entrepreneurship and soft skills development and to strengthening the competencies of the university career centers in promoting services for professional integration of their students. Furthermore, the university partners through a participatory approach, work on the realization of a competition of business ideas (from academia) on the basis of the start cup circuit linked to the Italian National Prize for Innovation which, in Italy, represents one of the main innovation events. The paper, in the first part, aims to analyze scenarios acting in different countries Italy, Morocco and Lebanon concerning youth entrepreneurship. In a second part, the Italian scouting model of Start Cup Competition is fully described detailing the series of steps, which allow selecting a winning idea. Results confirm that the startup completion model has produced remarkable positive change in Italian industrial tissue regarding economy, technology, human resource and territory.