San Donato Milanese (Milan), 29 October 2020 – “Human Knowledge Programme Open” begins today at Joule, Eni’s business school. It is open to all, free of charge, and designed to train aspiring entrepreneurs and founders of start-ups in the name of innovation and sustainability.

Joule wants to support Italy’s businesses at this historical moment of great challenge and profound transformation. It shows how important training people is to Eni, as its values testify.

Adopting an innovative format that combines online learning with a web streaming series, “Open” will take its participants on a journey through “The Rising Star Hotel”, an interactive web series in 12 episodes, based on the story of two young entrepreneurs, Anna and Pietro. The idea was conceived by TBWA/Italia in partnership with Alta Formazione and realised by Think Cattleya, taking inspiration freely from the Rice House, a start-up in the Biella area that turns waste rice into green building material. The participants will go through real business experiences, becoming protagonists of the story. This entrepreneurial learning is based on participation but also on interaction, allowing users to get involved and face situations in the series that come up every day in the business world.  The real situations they will face will lead to different outcomes based on their own decisions, with the episode plots changing from time to time as part of a process of training and experiential learning.

Esteemed universities and business schools such as LUISS, MiP Business School at Milan Polytechnic, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, SDA Bocconi, Federico II University, Feltrinelli Education and Fondazione Enrico Mattei will provide a solid programme, open to all for six months.

Every episode of “The Rising Star Hotel” will engage participants with specific business topics: studying reference markets, proposing the business idea; customer experience, branding and digital marketing, learning how to stand out and deal with the emotional side of communication; legal and financial aspects; crowdfunding, understanding how access to the credit market works; working with collaborators and involving them in creating value; communication skills, getting an idea across and putting oneself across well on social media.

All this is accompanied by the Community, a meeting point for future entrepreneurs, a virtuous ecosystem where they can meet other participants, trainers and entrepreneurs. It is a tool for growth that, thanks also to exclusive events, promotes professional networking and amplifies opportunities for doing business.

Participants will also have access to specific learning tools, such as webinars, documents, in-depth information, stories from entrepreneurs and real-life case studies, to improve and increase the skills they learn along the way. 

Joule is Eni’s school for business, opened to train aspiring runners of start-ups who want to do sustainable business with a focus on climate change, the circular economy and decarbonization, and not necessarily in the energy sector.

The initiative upholds Eni’s belief in ethical capitalism, and turns it into an engine for driving high-impact entrepreneurial initiatives in the fields of the energy transition and the move from a linear to a circular economic development model. This is very much in line with the goals Eni has set itself in recent years.

Joule takes its name from the unit of measurement for energy, and it bases its training on the unit of measurement for business: people. The school is based on the integration of business experience, academic skills and its students’ experience.

Eni’s business school is divided into two departments, which aim to encourage the growth of a virtuous business ecosystem in order to accelerate Italy. 

The programme is split into two courses: “HKP Open”, the innovative full-distance course accessible to all which opens today, and the existing “HKP Blended”, which is both in-class and long-distance and started in mid-October with 25 selected participants. 

Energizer is the ecosystem accelerator for the Joule school. It helps sustainable companies develop through incubation and acceleration programmes for start-ups and small and medium businesses, providing methodological, logistical and financial support. The accelerator already makes use of impressive partnerships, like with Polihub, an incubator managed by the Foundation of Milan Polytechnic and ELIS’s “Open Italy” platform, and is always enriching itself with new partners of excellence.