Finalist

Young Entrepreneurial University of the Year Award

Stuttgart Media University

Finalist of the Young Entrepreneurial University of the Year Award

"Vision 100% accomplished: Entrepreneurship for every single student!"


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Summary

Promoting entrepreneurship is not a single point of contact, but a funnel. HdM’s mission is to bring about a change in mindset towards entrepreneurship and innovation among all its students. It sees itself and all universities as the breeding ground for creativity, innovation and connections. Educators can have an immense impact and shape their students` future careers. Promising guidelines:
1. Expose everyone
2. Make classes available to every student
3. Encourage students to take their projects to the next level – even if a startup is not obvious at first
4. Support promising projects with scholarships, space and funding. Connect them with further support programs.
5. Identify scalable ideas and make the right connections into the startup ecoystems with venture financing and venture clients.

With conjoint projects in strong cooperation with other universities and partners, HdM is also building valuable synergies, creating joint support structures and enabling university-wide knowledge transfer and exchange between students and educators. One of the most promising projects with the greatest potential impact on the whole startup ecosystem is the Gründermotor initiative. It is a cross-university innovation platform in BW, set-up as a private-public partnership.
ASAP BW, the state-wide digital startup program and campus competition, led by HdM is part of it and one of the essential bricks, actively bridging the gap from the universities to the startup ecosystem. Furthermore, HdM has the lead for the educators network BW, supporting them by offering train-the-trainers, teaching materials, organizing events (e.g. IEES) and help building the already strong community.

Key People


June Nardiello
Project Lead
ASAP BW,  Stuttgart Media University



Magdalena Weinle
Deputy Director
HdM Startup Center,  Stuttgart Media University



Prof. Dr. Nils Högsdal
Vice Rector for Innovation
University Management,  Stuttgart Media University



Dr. Hartmut Rösch
Director
HdM Startup Center,  Stuttgart Media University



Prof. Dr. Alexander Roos
Rector
Stuttgart Media University


Images

nardiello@hdm-stuttgart.de

nardiello@hdm-stuttgart.de

nardiello@hdm-stuttgart.de

nardiello@hdm-stuttgart.de

ASAP BW Finals #6

ASAP BW PLaybook

ASAP Awards Ceremony with the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts

Bachelor course field trip

IMPACT STORY

Impacting lifes

Pim Ampikitpanich came to Germany from Thailand in 2011 and studied advertising at Stuttgart Media University from 2012 to 2016. During her studies, she often took part in Start-up Center workshops. Back then, her business model was convincing in the IDEA workshop and she won first prize. Her idea: a cooking box with all the important ingredients for a Thai main course. Now it was time to stick with it! With her Bachelor's degree in her pocket, Pim worked daily on her start-up and was advised by the Startup Centre: Working out ideas, conducting street surveys, developing prototypes, sending out test products and collecting feedback, contacting suppliers in Germany and Thailand, building a website, writing a business plan. As difficult as it sometimes was, Pim didn't want to compromise on the quality of the ingredients: "It wasn't easy at all to find a soy sauce without preservatives." And the farmer from whom she gets her rice, "I know him personally”. The packaging, which makes the product a bit more expensive, matches this. But here, too, Pim doesn't like to make any concessions. Buying the boxes would support older women in structurally weak areas of Thailand, the small bags are all woven by hand. Her company KONKRUA launched in 2017 with 5,500 cooking boxes - in three months they were all sold out. In the meantime, the boxes have made it into the shelves at big supermarket chains and also impressed the investors on the German edition of "Dragons’ Den”.

LEARNINGS

Lessons learned

We must practice what we preach: An offer is only convincing if it satisfies the needs of the customers - and these are our students, whom we must know and address accordingly with credible offers they trust.
1. Embed it into the curriculum and also look for non-obvious spots: Entrepreneurship is not just Business Administration. An innovation/design thinking workshop may be part of the onboarding process or an academic writing class, showing students how to formulate and either validate or falsify hypothesis.
2. Make sure students can get credits for it. Extracurricular activities are nice, but will shy away some students, especially females and minorities.
3. Think broad: entrepreneurship approaches can encourage innovation projects e.g. in arts, media and with impact-oriented students and will make it accessible to new groups of students.
4. Identify start-up personalities at your university. This is just as important as good advice and support for the founders, since it sometimes depends more on the person than the idea.
5. Also, credits and implementation into a curriculum are the currency providing teaching resources and budgets in the long run. Project funding is helpful, but will eventually end.
6. Link it to the overall strategy of the university in aspects such as internationalization, research and transfer as well as hiring and training.
7. Don’t just call it entrepreneurship, call it innovation. Entrepreneurship may quickly be linked to business administration, but everyone likes innovation – even our librarians.
8. Make it visible: you need spaces and people!

FUTURE PLANS

What's coming?

It seems that universities in Baden-Württemberg are among the few institutions in the world left having to follow 5-year-plans. The ambitious plans set out in 2016 for the years 2017-2022 have been exceeded. Senior leadership at HdM has committed to make entrepreneurship a key component of the future strategy of the universities, thereby defending the title to be the most entrepreneurial university in Germany.
Planned measures for the 2023-2027 period include:
- A new certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship with 30 ECTS serving as the pilot for the entire state accessible to every student.
- Offer a minor in innovation and entrepreneurship with 30 ECTS in English every bachelor student can take as part of their regular degree program as well as a concentration in Entrepreneurship with 15 ECTS for master students.
- Approach HR development strategically with a focus on providing research assistants with entrepreneurship skills as part of their career planning as well as an approach to transfer.
- Set up a student-run cooperative providing a low-key legal entity for entrepreneurial activities by students also making use of the (prototyping) facilities e.g. the packaging lab, printing facilities etc.
- Within the period more than 20% of the professors will retire. All departments and program heads are currently revisiting the profiles of the new openings and are strongly encouraged to look for candidates also having entrepreneurial experiences.

KEY STATISTICS

100%

of all HdM students have attended at least one start-up-related course

Ø 1.000

Students reached through entrepreneurship events every year

Ø 500

Students in entrepreneurship lectures every year

Ø 200

Start-up projects/solo-self-employed people advised per year

27

HdM teams received the prestigious EXIST start-up grant by the German federal government

>33

national and international startup-related projects have been successfully implemented by the startup center since 2011

>22

Employees working on educational entrepreneurship activities are currently financed at HdM

>1.600

Students from >74 universities participated in the state-wide early stage accelerator program ASAP BW since its beginning in 2019

>600

Startup teams participated in ASAP BW (of which 58% are conveyed in the ecosystem and continue)

>1.000

Playbooks spread among students and educators in BW

105

Educators in Baden Württemberg (short BW) trained for business model innovation

Triple E Awards

The Triple E Awards are a global recognition of efforts toward the quest for entrepreneurship and engagement in higher education. It is the first award to focus specifically on different dimensions of the universities' third mission. Implemented regionally, the Triple E Awards aim to foster change in universities and to emphasize their role in their communities and ecosystems.

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