Slovenia has a genuinely active entrepreneurship ecosystem. Public support structures, startup grants, incubators and accelerators, mentoring schemes, coworking spaces, creative hubs, a steady calendar of networking events. On paper, a young person starting out has plenty to draw on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our local reality research found a catch, and it is a structural one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost all of that support is designed around a particular profile: registered businesses, innovative startups, SMEs with growth potential, technology-oriented companies. It also assumes a level of readiness that is rarely stated out loud. To get through the door you generally need to be able to write a business plan, complete an application form and pitch your idea convincingly to a panel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Young freelancers and self-employed people often sit just below that line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They are not lacking ability. Many already have paying clients, a portfolio and a clear sense of what they want to do. What they lack is the layer of practical knowledge that startup programmes take as given: choosing the right legal form, setting prices that hold up, finding the next client before the current project ends, keeping cash flow steady through a slow month, turning a service into something repeatable, and building a local network when you have been working alone from a kitchen table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of that is glamorous. All of it decides whether someone is still in business in two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is what we call the missing middle. Not the young person with an idea and no experience, and not the founder with a growth-stage company, but the one in between: already working, already earning, and with no obvious next step that fits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SHIFT works as a bridge between the support that already exists and the young people who cannot yet reach it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The project background comes from focus group analyses carried out by each partner organisation in Slovenia, Lithuania and Portugal, so the design starts from what young people actually described rather than from an assumed profile. Those findings feed directly into the Freelancer-to-Startup Toolkit: five modules covering business modelling, productisation, lean startup methodology, financial literacy and growth strategies, published in Slovenian, Lithuanian, Portuguese and English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alongside the toolkit, SHIFT runs a training programme for trainers and national bootcamps for young people in all three countries, so the material reaches people through organisations they already trust locally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Slovenia has a genuinely active entrepreneurship ecosystem. Public support structures, startup grants, incubators and accelerators, mentoring schemes, coworking spaces, creative hubs, a steady calendar of networking events. On paper, a young person starting out has plenty to draw on. Our local reality research found a catch, and it is a structural one. Almost all of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":979,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-978","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-gadgets"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":980,"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions\/980"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emc-club.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}