Eastern Partnership countries of the European Union should improve their competitiveness. Armenia had a ranking of 69th and Georgia 74th in the latest 2019 Global Competitiveness Index 4.0. Additionally, due to rather small internal markets, there is an urgent need for future professionals armed with the mindset and competences needed in modern international businesses. Higher education graduates can’t rely on old business models, especially not with the focus only in Business-to-Customer (B2C) commerce. However, Armenian and Georgian universities are lacking of Business-to-Business (B2B) sales education and research.

Learn-Innovate-Sell-Succeed LISS21 project is aiming at increasing B2B Sales and innovation capacity of Armenian and Georgian universities, especially in the field of engineering. The methodology of the project is built on three core elements: main substance, pedagogical practices and knowledge transfer. All these cornerstones are linked in to serve the purposes of effective and sustainable capacity building process.

Tangible outcomes of the project are strongly linked to the Knowledge Triangle approach. We will introduce B2B Sales courses in all six Armenian and Georgian partner universities and the assessment of students’ learning outcomes will be conducted in Sales Competitions. Secondly, Innovation Competitions enable effective learning and creation of potential new products and services.

Thirdly, Sales Labs will be launched to foster understanding about salesperson’s and customer’s behavior as well as accelerate new university-business cooperation in education and research. Active dissemination and stakeholder cooperation enable other universities to utilize results and experiences of the LISS21 project.

As a short-term impact, companies will get more qualified engineers with competences needed to accelerate international businesses. In the long run, this will lead to increased competitiveness of partner countries.