Picture: Aeneas Rekkas, founder of Serlo Education, at the first Meetup of founders@unibw

How are we going to transform UniBw M into an Entrepreneurial University?

• The first step ist to evaluate, supplement and combine existing offers into a coordinated educational program and make it visible and popular. This includes teaching courses at the faculties of economics and engineering, our studium generale "studium plus" and certificate courses offered by the center of advanced studies "casc". Our goal is to create an integrated entrepreneurship education program to inspire and promote start-up teams. It will be part of all degree programs, the advanced study program and the training program for academic and non-academic employees.

• Interdisciplinary courses are intended to bring together knowledge resources, human capital and social networks within and outside the university. For example, promising (e.g. patented) technologies can be identified in project-based teaching formats in cooperation with the Knowledge and Technology Transfer Office. Then, interdisciplinary teams (engineering, social, humanities and economics) work out business plans and roadmaps together with the scientists who submitted the inventions.

• We also want to strengthen partnerships with universities, organizations, companies and institutions, such as the three Munich Entrepreneurship Centers (UnternehmerTUM, LMU Entrepreneurship Center and Strascheg Center for Entrepreneurship (SCE)). In addition, we want to participate in regional and supraregional formats, such as Global Entrepreneurship Summer School, 5 Euro StartUp or BayStratUP. By actively participating in existing regional start-up networks (e.g. organizing events) and systematically and sustainably establishing our own start-up network, we aim to provide potential founders with spin-off-promoting resources and contacts.

• We want to expand our IP service into a knowledge and technology transfer office that supports the evaluation of inventions, helps with patent applications and promotes the licensing of inventions to interested partners.

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  Internships and theses offered by start-ups and discussion forums with founders are intended to raise awareness among young scientists and advanced education students about setting up a company as an alternative career opportunity.

• An incubator program will be launched to provide substantial support to selected start-ups through mentoring, financing, provision of office space and laboratories, reputation, supervision and management support if required. This also includes infrastructural measures such as the creation of coworking spaces and a (virtual) maker lab. In this context, practical solutions must also be found for legal issues such as cross-financing and split accounting.

• In addition, a suitable communication structure for entrepreneurship activities is to be established on the intranet and via social networks.

• In short: We want to establish a start-up-friendly ecosystem at the university, including project based courses on knowledge and technology marketing for students and faculty members, mentoring programmes for the allocation of experts, a systematic accelerator/incubator programme and business planning competitions. Qualified partners for entrepreneurial activities will be identified and trained in each faculty.

Bild: Beim Kickoff-Meetup von founders@unibw