Expanded cooperation with Junior Achievement

Jönköping University (JU) is a new partner to Junior Achievement (JA) in Jönköping County and can thus reach out to creative young people in the county in a more strategic way.

“We are very pleased that JU has chosen to expand its partnership with us,” says Jelena Trupina, Regional Manager for Junior Achievement (JA) in Jönköping County.

At JU, innovation, entrepreneurship and business are very important parts, both in teaching and alongside the studies. Therefore, JU is now expanding its collaboration with Junior Achievement (Ung Företagsamhet). According to Jelena Trupina, this will strengthen the parties' joint endeavour to promote entrepreneurship and innovation in Jönköping County.

Over 300 JA companies

On 27 February, this year's JA Fair was held at Elmia in Jönköping with over 300 JA companies. The JA Fair is a forum for belief in the future, business, and entrepreneurship where thousands of creative young people from Jönköping County participated as both exhibitors and visitors. Three of them were Nike Jakobsson, Elisa Yaacoub and Dinah Jidah, who are studying the Economics programme at Sandagymnasiet in Jönköping. Their business idea is to sell designed paintings of concrete and putty through the JA company Sculpted Walls. They think it has been instructive to run a JA company, but that there has been a lot to think about.

Want to study at JU

“We will probably continue with some of our business ideas in the future, but we don't know exactly what it will look like,” say Elisa and Dinah.

What they are sure of, however, is that they want to study the Logistics and Management programme at the School of Engineering, JU in the autumn. Nike says that she probably won’t continue studying this autumn.

During the fair, JA companies competed in the regional JA championship and there were several competitions during the day – everything from best innovation to most socially sustainable JA company or best service. In most of the competitions, the winning JA company qualified for the Swedish Championship for Junior Achievement.

“Big development potential”

“Today marked the start of our new collaboration with JA. We will also participate in the start-up, which JA organizes for new, young entrepreneurs, and there is big development potential in our cooperation in the future,” says Anders Wadell, Communications Officer at JU.