Angel Marinov (Technical University of Varna)
Executive Summary
This deliverable — D2.1 Project Roadmap — is the analytical and strategic output of Work Package 2 of the Mind the Gap project (Horizon Europe Grant Agreement No. 101215579). It fulfils two interconnected objectives: first, to produce a rigorous, evidence-based needs analysis of the challenges facing PhD students, Master’s students, and early-career researchers in relation to entrepreneurship and research commercialisation; and second, to translate that analysis into a structured methodology transfer roadmap that equips Work Package 3 with the content resources, pedagogical frameworks, and programme architecture needed to build and deliver the Mind the Gap programme.
The needs analysis
The needs analysis draws on five complementary evidence streams. The first is the project’s own primary research — a combined survey of 109 respondents across English and Bulgarian language versions, ten qualitative interviews with PhD and Master’s students, and a partner insight questionnaire completed by 12 respondents across all six consortium partner organisations. The second draws on data and outputs from four related European initiatives — SEEN (Erasmus+), SEEDPlus (Horizon Europe), Inspiring the Minds (Erasmus+), and Scale2Connect (Horizon Europe) — providing comparative depth, geographic breadth, and cross-validation across more than 500 additional respondents spanning four languages and three continents.
All evidence is analysed through the 4Cs framework — Competence, Capacity, Collaboration, and Culture — which structures the findings and connects the needs analysis to the methodology transfer.
The central finding of the needs analysis is consistent across all five evidence sources: the gap between academic research and entrepreneurial action is not primarily a problem of individual motivation or capability — it is a problem of system design. Researchers demonstrate the interest, the intellectual capacity, and in many cases the specific research outputs that could form the basis of a venture or commercial application. What they systematically lack is the commercial knowledge to act on that potential, the institutional infrastructure to support them, the collaborative networks to connect them to the ecosystem, and the cultural environment that would make entrepreneurship feel like a legitimate and accessible choice.
Across the 4Cs, the evidence establishes: that business, legal, IP, and financial literacy are universally absent from researcher training and that this gap is level-specific in character, shifting from confidence and awareness at Bachelor level to financial risk at Master’s level to business-specific knowledge at PhD level; that institutional provision exists at partner HEIs but is invisible, inaccessible, and structurally constrained by incentive systems that actively penalise industry engagement; that mentoring is the most consistently identified unmet need across all evidence sources, and that its absence is structural rather than incidental; and that entrepreneurship is not perceived as a legitimate pathway for researchers outside STEM fields, with risk aversion, failure stigma, and isolation compounding all other barriers.
The gender and diversity analysis identifies five specific structural barriers layered on top of the universal needs: pipeline attrition between Master’s and PhD level among women; the entrepreneurial self-efficacy gap — lower interest and preparedness ratings among women despite equivalent academic exposure; an accessibility gap among female Bachelor students at technical institutions significantly exceeding that of male peers; the time poverty and life-stage barriers facing mid-career researchers with caring responsibilities; and sectoral exclusion, whereby entrepreneurship support disproportionately serves STEM researchers while those in social sciences, humanities, health, and management are systematically underserved.
These findings are consolidated into a Needs Map of twenty named, evidenced, and targeted needs (Table 7) that constitutes the design brief for the methodology transfer.
The methodology transfer
Part 2 establishes a structured transfer framework built around three analytical questions applied to each programme component: what to transfer from the sister projects, why, and what Work Package 3 must do with it. The transfer is organised across four components.
The course design transfer draws on the Inspiring the Minds co-creation framework as the design logic, the SEEDPlus Venture Creation Course as the primary content source for business and commercial competencies, and the SEEN course book for AI tools and research project management content. Three module clusters are proposed: Foundations (entrepreneurial mindset, researcher identity, inclusion and diversity arc); Venture Creation Essentials (adapted from SEEDPlus VCC); and Research Commercialisation Pathways — the genuinely novel contribution that WP3 must build, covering licensing, spin-off, knowledge transfer partnerships, IP at doctoral depth, and pitch communication for research audiences. Four modules from the Inspiring the Minds project (Modules 2, 3, 5, and 6) are selected for transfer and integration into the Foundations cluster to address the inclusion and diversity dimension.
The digital tool transfer takes the SEEN AI Platform — a working RAG-based chatbot deployed on TUV infrastructure — as the base, and proposes a knowledge base extension rather than a technical rebuild. The platform’s current generalness, identified through testing data from 108 users, is addressed by curating and uploading a researcher-specific corpus covering IP management, commercialisation pathways, TTO navigation, and researcher-entrepreneur case studies across disciplines and genders.
The ecosystem and mentoring model transfer draws on the SEEDPlus two-stage competition format, the SEEN event model, the Scale2Connect ecosystem mapping methodology, and the ConceptionX cohort approach to design an annual programme cycle. The mentoring infrastructure — the highest-priority new development task — must be built by WP3 as a structured, discipline-diverse, gender-diverse matching system that converts the individual willingness already present in the consortium’s partner networks into reliable, equitable, and sustained researcher access.
Gender and diversity requirements are embedded as design principles across all three components rather than addressed through a standalone intervention, with specific requirements for hybrid delivery, diverse mentor pools, discipline-neutral content, targeted outreach to women at PhD level, and the integration of Inspiring the Minds inclusion content.
The integrated model that results operates on three timescales simultaneously: the module timescale of individual competence-building, the mentoring timescale of sustained human guidance, and the cohort and event timescale of community, accountability, and ecosystem connection. The needs map accounting in Table 12 confirms full or partial coverage of eighteen of the twenty named needs, with two — mandatory curriculum integration and institutional incentive alignment — identified as requiring HEI-level structural advocacy beyond what programme design alone can deliver.
Strategic outlook
Part 3 places the project within the European Research and Innovation Area policy landscape and identifies the enabling conditions, risks, and sustainability mechanisms that will determine whether the integrated model delivers its intended impact beyond the grant period. Open access publication of course content, the low operational cost of the RAG-based digital tool, the institutionalisation of the ecosystem connector function, and the formalisation of the mentoring infrastructure as a consortium-embedded system are the primary sustainability mechanisms. Scalability beyond the consortium is designed into each component through documented replication guides and licensing arrangements aligned with European open education and open science commitments.
The deliverable closes with a consolidated brief for WP3 that specifies what it inherits from the sister projects and can begin implementing immediately, and what it must develop from scratch — precisely scoped, grounded in evidence, and ready to begin.