Understanding the human journey of global colonisation is the history of modern humanity and the development of the diverse characteristics of peoples and cultures around the world. This five-year interdisciplinary project will investigate the peopling of South America, the last continental terra incognita (other than Antarctica) to be colonised by humans, constituting a virtually unprecedented migration of modern humans across richly diverse, empty landscapes during the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene transition. Situated at the geographical gateway to the continent, the project will investigate one of the most momentous demographic dispersals of our species into the diverse environments of north-western South America, encompassing coasts, savannahs and lowland, Sub Andean and Andean tropical forests. This process took place amidst one of the most significant climatic, environmental, and subsistence regime shifts in human history, which contributed to the extinction of megafauna, plant domestication, and today’s remarkable diversity of indigenous South American groups. Despite its geographical importance and a wealth of archaeological and palaeoecological data across its diverse environments, north-western South America has only been given cursory consideration to understand processes of human dispersion. This project will redress this imbalance by applying an innovative interdisciplinary approach that integrates state-of-art archaeology, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology, ancient environmental DNA and isotope studies. The results will provide a global comparative perspective to the study of Late Pleistocene human colonisations, hunter-gatherer adaptations, the demise of megafauna and the beginning of plant cultivation and domestication. The results of the project have broader implications not only for archaeology but also for geography, palaeoclimate, palaeoecology, and molecular biology.

The Latin American region lacks a program that has a strong international character and to focus on the entrepreneurial university, for that reason, the REDEMPRENDIA has planned to launch the REDEMPRENDIA STARS program, an international business acceleration program to support the transfer of knowledge from universities to society. SOLA project is directly linked to REDEMPRENDIA STARS program as it develops and implements the training path for technical staff that will implement in the future the STARS program.As a specific objective, the project will implement a common training route to all partner universities of the project aimed at technical staff of universities with business incubator for acceleration and consolidation of strong innovative entrepreneurship and technological European Latin American and European Universities.The project consortium is composed by four higher education institutions in Latin America and four other European, all covered by an umbrella entity that six of the eight higher education institutions are members. This consortium is complemented by a business consulting Devalar, it brings to the project its expertise in the dissemination and capitalization of results field.The main results sought by the SOLA project are: Training module of 30 hours on LEAN CANVAS, training module 30 hours on strategic redefinition of start ups, industrial property and quality certifications, training module 30 hours duration of internationalization of companies, training module 30 hours on training of trainers in basic finance for entrepreneurs and consolidation and implementation of the course of 120 hours of final training for technical staff of incubators.

LASIN aims to effectively support and promote social innovation as a means to achieve sustainable and inclusive socio-economic growth, social cohesion and equity in Latin America, through intercultural, curricular and extracurricular activities. It will achieve this by establishing Social Innovation Support Units (SISU) within the Partner Countries to promote and support University-social enterprise cooperation, social entrepreneurship and graduate employability with a particular emphasis on social innovation projects, incubation and training. A range of learning and teaching tools will be developed, at a formal level through the development of a doctoral programme and more informally through CPD training of stakeholders in social innovation as well as through books and reports and a social innovation platform – a virtual space for sharing social innovation practices and learning outcomes. The project will establish international cooperation and internationalisation through a network of SISUs across the region introducing a training, mentoring and transfer scheme to ensure that there is an effective roll-out of the scheme beyond the original partnership. In addition, the project will specifically aim to involve local communities and in particular disadvantaged groups to give them access to University facilities and strengthen the ties between HEIs and their local social environment. There are at least two HEI partners representing each Partner country, one of which has experience at delivering social innovation training and other initiatives within their country and beyond. The EU Partners have a wide experience of delivering international innovation projects and embedding social innovative initiatives within their own institutions.

The project aims to contribute to the improvement of the employability indexes and the labor insertion of the graduates of the higher education institutions of the countries of the Pacific Alliance (Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile), through permanent monitoring and analysis. Needs and characteristics of the labor market and the construction of national guidelines and policies that contribute to the creation of a relevant training offer and the strengthening of the academic programs offered by HEIs in the participating countries.