Hristina Vasileva, chairperson of the cluster: We were very motivated to work with entrepreneurs in the herb production and eco-tourism. Our cluster has a lot of experience in working with start-ups, especially such of female owners. Our project Business on high wheels implemented in 2016-2017 gave us a lot of insights about the barriers and bottlenecks young entrepreneurs have to overcome – lack of financial resources, poor research on market needs, defining the target group for a new product and price policy issues, especially when launching a new product on the market.

In our previous work we encountered a lot of dedicated and strong female entrepreneurs – most of them establishing companies in the field of services – medical/nursing services, accounting, social enterprises etc. – all of them in big cities within a competitive environment. We were curious however to understand how small and poorly populated regions could support producing entrepreneurs and how the eco-tourism can be bound with herbs’ containing products and offers. When choosing the mentors and developing the simulation models we took part in, we invested a lot of efforts and all our expertise in teaching business planning. Our main aim – to build a case studies portfolio which can be used as open educational resources when establishing a company and especially when developing business plans.

We wish the very best of luck to the Business and Information Center FLOREO in Trigrad and will welcome future opportunities for partnering again.