From Educational Challenge to European Project

What if the best place to start an Erasmus+ project is not the application form, but a real challenge? This course combines Design Thinking with CreActionality™, an original methodology developed by Giancarlo La Pietra that brings creativity, rational analysis and action together to turn meaningful challenges into practical, testable and impact-oriented solutions.

Through collaborative workshops, real-life cases, experimentation, peer feedback and project-design labs, you explore needs, stakeholders, European relevance, objectives, activities, partnerships, impact and sustainability. Working on a real challenge from your own organisation, you move through five stages, each with its own question and output:

• Discover — What are we really trying to change? → Educational Challenge Statement
• Define — Why does it matter, and why Europe? → Needs & European Relevance Map
• Design — What could we design to address it? → European Project Architecture
• Connect — Who do we need to make it happen? → Preliminary Consortium Map
• Develop — Can this become a credible project? → Project Concept and Pitch

By the end of five days you move from “We have an idea” to “We have a European project concept, and we understand why it makes sense, who it serves, how it could work and what change it aims to achieve.” The objective is not a finished Erasmus+ application, but a coherent project concept ready to be developed into one.

This is not primarily a course on how to write an Erasmus+ application. It is a course on how to design a European project before writing the application. Participants spend five days designing, testing and refining a project of their own, not studying templates. The course follows one logic: Challenge → Needs → European Dimension → Objectives → Activities → Partners → Impact.

Many education professionals know Erasmus+, but knowing the programme does not mean knowing how to turn an organisational challenge into a coherent European project. Typical starting points include “We need to improve digital skills”, “Our students are disengaged”, “We want to internationalise our organisation”, “We would like to work with European partners”, “We need new approaches to inclusion” and “We have an interesting idea, but we don’t know whether it can become a project”. Connecting a real need with a meaningful intervention, a relevant European dimension, the right partners and measurable change requires more than knowledge of funding programmes. It requires a way to explore problems, question assumptions, generate alternatives, analyse feasibility and turn promising ideas into practical concepts.

The course responds to the difficulties participants most often bring:

• “Our ideas are too generic.” — you explore, reframe and specify the challenge.
• “We know Erasmus+, but don’t know where to start.” — a structured design process comes before the application stage.
• “We need partners, but don’t know what kind.” — capability-driven consortium design.
• “We have partners, but their roles are unclear.” — complementarity, responsibilities and contributions.
• “We start writing too early.” — project design is separated from proposal writing.
• “We don’t know whether our idea needs European cooperation.” — European added value is built into the design process.
• “Our needs, activities and expected impact are poorly connected.” — the project’s intervention logic is developed and tested.
• “We have ideas but struggle to turn them into action.” — experimentation, prototyping and feedback improve the concept.

Rome is part of the methodology, not only the location of the course, following the principle Experience → Observe → Reflect → Reframe → Design. Depending on participant profiles and the availability of suitable organisations, the programme may include visits or encounters with educational and other relevant organisations. The purpose is not tourism: the city is used as a living laboratory to observe educational challenges, stakeholder relationships and possible responses, and every external visit has a clear learning question that connects directly to the project-design process.

The course is relevant both to newcomers to project development and to experienced professionals who want to strengthen their design stage. Suitable organisations include schools, VET providers, universities, adult education organisations, training providers, education networks, NGOs working in education and inclusion, and organisations developing internationalisation strategies. It complements existing Erasmus+ proposal-writing training rather than duplicating it: the resulting concept can later be developed against the eligibility criteria, priorities and requirements of a relevant funding opportunity. The aim is not to teach people to write projects, but to help them learn how to design projects worth writing.