Doctoral candidates become tomorrow’s entrepreneurs
The founder city Karlsruhe and especially KIT offer the perfect platform for emerging entrepreneurs to develop their ideas into a potential business idea and found their own business. In light of this fact, the Institute for Entrepreneurship, Technology Management and Innovation (EnTechnon) developed the first “PhD Spring School on Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship”: The focus was on technological inventions as a basis for startups.
In cooperation with the HECTOR School of Engineering & Management, the School took place from March 26th to March 31st with 21 participants. The participants mainly came from the technological and scientific area. With the help of technical lectures and workshops, they were able to acquire the foundational know-how for the startup of a business. In addition to the theoretical foundations, the scientists were taught how to develop business ideas from research results and technologies. In different workshops, such as creativity, business model development, and financial planning, participants were able to apply their newly acquired stills to practical examples in smaller groups. Among other things, the subject matter to practice on was the technology offerings at KIT, from which the participants created business ideas. These results were presented to a jury at the concluding pitch event on March 31st and the individual groups received feedback about their business ideas.
Andreas Przybilla is a doctoral candidate at KIT. The PhD Spring School was able to strengthen his determination to found his own business. “I received a lot of help in developing my idea into a business idea because there are many aspects in the process of starting up a business that we don’t tend to consider by ourselves.” Przybilla recommends this ‘101’ to all doctoral candidates who seek starting up a business.
Fabian Graf of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg also gives a positive summary of the intensive workdays. The PhD School has given him knowledge of the expectations, preparation, and important topics in business startups. The workshops helped him acquire techniques and tools in order to better realize his creativity and frame his thoughts in a more structured way. “It was a total of four days, so you don’t sacrifice too much PhD working time. But considering such a short amount of time, it was very intensive, all culminating in a pitch event. Here, one can use everything one has learned throughout the past days.”
After the successful end to the School, the preparations for the next round are already underway: the second School will take place in September 2014. For questions and more information, please contact Anja Wahl.
On April 23, 2015, the opening event of the Entrepreneurship Talks for the summer semester 2015 took place. Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Stork, multiple founder of KIT spin-offs, collegial leader of the Institute for Information Processing Technologies (ITIV), and director of the area of embedded systems and sensor engineering at the Research Center for Information Technology was invited as a guest. He talked about his professional career, which impressively combines science and entrepreneurship.
