Austrian training consultancy specialising in women's entrepreneurship, adult learning, and career identity transition within EU research consortia.
3s Unternehmensberatung ("3s Management Consulting") is a Vienna-based SME specialising in education, training, and adult learning policy. Their H2020 work centres on designing and evaluating training programmes for entrepreneurship—with a particular emphasis on women—and on building inclusive lifelong learning systems across Europe. They bring practitioner knowledge of how adults acquire new identities and skills during career transitions, translating research on meaning-making and learning transfer into concrete training tools. In EU consortia, they serve as a bridge between academic research and applied training practice.
Lead expertise demonstrated in 'Transforming European Women's Entrepreneurship: The Education and Training for Success Programme', covering curriculum design, identity transition, and meaning-making for women entering entrepreneurship.
Contributed to ENLIVEN ('Encouraging Lifelong Learning for an Inclusive and Vibrant Europe'), a RIA project focused on systemic barriers to adult participation in learning across Europe.
Keyword 'learning transfer' appears across both projects, indicating a cross-cutting methodological role in measuring whether training actually changes behaviour and outcomes.
Keywords 'meaning making' and 'identity transition' in the women entrepreneurs project point to applied social psychology expertise used to support individuals through major career shifts.
Both projects started in 2015–2016, so a genuine chronological shift is hard to establish from the data alone. What the keyword contrast does reveal is a conceptual progression: the earlier women entrepreneurs project was tightly scoped around a specific demographic and psychosocial processes (identity, meaning, transfer), while ENLIVEN expanded the frame to systemic, policy-level questions about inclusive learning across entire populations. The trend suggests 3s was moving from targeted intervention design toward broader European learning policy work, though with only two projects this remains tentative.
3s appears to be broadening from niche entrepreneurship training toward pan-European adult learning policy, making them a potentially useful partner for any Horizon Europe project touching skills, inclusion, or workforce transitions.
3s has only ever joined consortia as a participant—never as coordinator—suggesting they prefer to contribute specialist expertise rather than lead administrative and financial management of projects. Across just two projects they accumulated 15 partners in 13 countries, which means they work in large, internationally diverse consortia rather than tight bilateral arrangements. This profile is typical of a niche consultancy that brings practitioner credibility and is recruited precisely for its applied training or policy knowledge.
3s has worked with 15 distinct partners spanning 13 countries from only two projects, indicating they consistently join large multinational consortia rather than small bilateral collaborations. No country concentration is evident from the available data.
3s sits at an uncommon intersection: a private management consultancy with genuine research credentials in adult learning psychology and gender entrepreneurship, operating inside MSCA and RIA consortia typically dominated by universities. For consortium builders, this means access to applied training methodology and practitioner networks that academic partners rarely provide. Their focus on identity transition and meaning-making gives them a distinctive conceptual toolkit for projects addressing workforce change, re-skilling, or entrepreneurship support.
