Promoting the start-up culture at the University of Mannheim
The University of Mannheim has produced many outstanding start-ups in the past. With the Mannheim Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MCEI), it created a central point of contact in March 2013 that specifically promotes start-ups from the university and technology transfer in the region. With the help of the MCEI, we network start-up activities within the university and offer all players in our start-up ecosystem an open platform for exchange. We communicate start-up successes and best practices and also help to learn from failures. With the MCEI initiative, we have already significantly advanced the startup ecosystem at the University of Mannheim and in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region (MRN). The MCEI makes it easier for students at all levels of education to successfully found a company and offers direct links to the current call for proposals from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts to promote a start-up culture at Baden-Württemberg's universities. With our previous measures for inspiration (virtual MCEI platform, Startup Lounges & Founder Talks), the training of founders (start-up teaching in the Master's program, Entrepreneurship Bootcamps) and the targeted support of start-ups (advice & referral within our network), we have already achieved great success since the founding of the MCEI (over 150 supported start-ups, approx. 2,500 inspired start-up event participants and over 1,000 students in the Entrepreneurship specialization). Building on the entrepreneurship measures established to date, we want to further strengthen the start-up culture at the University of Mannheim through targeted new measures. With the project on “Promoting the start-up culture at the University of Mannheim” over the next three years, we want to offer all MCEI courses across all faculties and enrich them with new interdisciplinary teaching formats, such as collaborative entrepreneurship action learning and design thinking. In particular, we will promote networking between students and start-ups and enable new learning experiences for everyone involved.
The start-up culture at the University of Mannheim is to be further cultivated and strengthened with three new entrepreneurship modules, which we intend to offer from September 2016: (1) through new innovative entrepreneurship course formats that pursue an action-oriented learning approach (action learning): Students and start-ups work together in concrete start-up projects as part of new entrepreneurship courses to be set up, as well as through (2) implementation of a new start-up mentoring concept and (3) regular extracurricular entrepreneurship events. With the entrepreneurship events, we want to anchor norms, values and behaviors that focus on mutual support and serendipity, and which, according to the latest findings, are particularly conducive to the startup culture for successful entrepreneurship behavior[1], at the University of Mannheim and in the MRN. Our aim is to promote a culture of exchange and mutual learning between start-ups and students that encourages them to found companies. Furthermore, we proactively network our students interested in founding a company with our regional and national entrepreneurship partners.
With our established and new entrepreneurship measures, we aim to optimally prepare our students for a promising transition from their studies and training into their own startup, for a job in a startup, for a career as a corporate entrepreneur or for self-employment at a later date. Our recent successes speak for the sustainability of our entrepreneurship measures to date and our commitment to building a strong startup ecosystem in Mannheim and the MRN.
[1] see Isaak, Isaak & Zybura (2016) and Hwang & Horowitt (2012)