Successful TENCompetence review

In February 2009 the third annual TENCompetence review took place in Innsbruck, of which the review report has recently been released by the European Commission. The project as a whole is praised by the reviewers for its results of the third year, while CELSTEC, a research institute of the Open University in The Netherlands, is specifically commended for its management and coordination of the project. The laudatory report also contains some recommendations for the fourth and final year of the project.

Review results
The reviewers stated that the consortium is to be commended for the successful achievements of the previous period, namely for the technological development of an overall set of components and tools. They commented that last year’s recommendations were well addressed, especially as to more focus on non-formal learning and professional development.

Fourth year focus
According to the reviewers, the principal challenges facing the project now relate to integration, outreach, and take-up. The fourth year of the project is the ultimate chance to demonstrate all the already existing results in an integrated way and pave the way for sustainable take-up of project results beyond the end of the funded project. For the fourth year of the project the reviewers gave the following recommendations:
- The establishment of the Foundation was a first good step towards sustainability. Now the follow-up needs to be done, to start with the development of an Exploitation Plan or Business Plan.
- Academically the project has been more than successful, and now should shift its emphasis from the academic community to the future TENCompetence services providers that will build businesses around the project outcomes.
- Focus the demonstration and valorisation activities, by limiting the number of possible tool configurations and demonstrate clear business cases.
- Define valorisation indicators and verify these with the Valorisation Committee (Advisory committee under the Board).
- Keep the social aspect of competence development in focus
- Compile a list of all project documents and products with their license type

Presentations of products
During the one-day review the consortium presented: 1) demo’s of all the tools they developed so far, and 2) the pilots and business demonstrators being conducted. The review was concluded with presentations by those Work Packages that had not yet been presented.

About TENCompetence
TENCompetence is funded by the European Commission through the IST Programme with 15 partners from throughout Europe. It is developing and using infrastructure to support individuals, groups and organisations in lifelong competence development. SURFfoundation, Open Universiteit Nederland (CELSTEC) and the Universiteit van Amsterdam are the Dutch partners of the European TENCompetence project.