June 6, 2023
Home » university

university

Uncategorized
Entrepreneurship across disciplines
plameng Posted On May 15, 2013


You are a student with a lot of brilliant ideas, but with one question at the back of your head: “Is it worth it?” Yes, you want to start your own business, but you’re not sure if that’s the career path for you? As of recently, there is a way for you to make your own well-informed decisions; it’s called ECN.

What is ECN?

ECN stands for Entrepreneurship Center Network, an interdisciplinary project for all university students in Vienna looking to expand their knowledge and skills in the areas of entrepreneurship and business startups. As part of the initiative, students will be able to compare their business skills to their peers’, explore ideas, and create a network with fellow-minded participants. The project stems from the launch of a new course in the department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Garage – Business Planning and Performance, earlier this year. (You can read more about it in our previous report).

The network aims to create a common ground between Vienna’s universities, connect “all different disciplines” and thus bring together The Academy of Fine Arts Wien, BOKU Vienna, MU, TU, WU and Veterinary Medicine Vienna. Thomas Funke, one of the project creators, told inventures.eu that the main goal of ECN is “to raise awareness for the topic of entrepreneurship among Austrian students.” He hopes that the network can make “entrepreneurship become a career alternative for students of all disciplines.”

Earlier this week, we reported on the upcoming launch of a Masters programme in Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the New Design University (NDU) in St. Pölten. Its focus will also be on interdisciplinary courses and networking opportunities, among others.

It is never late

ECNetwork gives chance to already established entrepreneurs to search for the best startup project by students. By taking part in The Challenge, young teams will have the opportunity to present their entrepreneurial ideas, and prove that they can be the next big thing.

The deadline for registration is 31 May, so don’t miss it! To sign up, send an email with all team members’ contact data to this email address. What will follow is the first team challenge, to be held online. In this stage, participants will be tested on how cohesive their team is, as well as on their strengths in different business areas. After the online phase, the best applicants will come together with The Challenge coaches, who will help them develop their ideas to a state where they can be presented in front of a jury.

ECN “ha[s] a huge network of coaches from [our] lectures” Funke said. The advisors of the teams seem to be a very heterogeneous group, coming from both academia and business. Follow the link for the full list of coaches under guest professors . The Jury, which will evaluate the student projects, will be chosen from the group of possible coaches “including a couple of investors,” hinted Funke.

The best startup ideas will be chosen on 19 June, and they’ll get a chance to further expand their projects. The awards include space in the coworking office Treibhaus; several months worth of coaching by WhataVenture followed by a slot on the Crowdfunding platform Conda; or an internship at an incubator in New York.

The Challenge is the first initiative by the ECN to gather students from various fields of study to work together on common entrepreneurial projects. For more information, consult their webpage.

For more information on entrepreneurship at universities, see our coverage here and here. 


Continue Reading
0
73 Views


Uncategorized
TU students sure like a challenge
floord Posted On May 1, 2013


You know how people always call their problems “challenges”, because that way they sound less daunting? These people obviously never took part in a hunTU event. huntWHAT?

The hunTU is a kind of scavenger hunt, organised by a few students from the Technical University (TU) in Vienna. The idea is simple: You form a team and from the moment you (and all the other participating teams) get the item list, you have 3.141 days to collect/make/do as many things as possibly possible. For every item, you earn a certain amount of points. The team with the most points wins. This year is hunTU’s sixth anniversary.

To get an idea of what items are on that list:

  • The team as Tetris stones
  • Bacon roses
  • Three Chinese people with a contra bass
  • A dorm room completely wrapped in aluminium foil
  • A map of Vienna from before 1939
  • A sphinx cut out of celery

Yet, the event isn’t all fun. The participants literally go to extremes to get ahead of the competition. One team had a scout posting in the assembly room, where all items and actions get ranked by an unbiased jury, to see how the other teams are doing and what they would “get away with”. And participating means no sleep for days on end.

This year’s teams will first get their hands on the item list on 9 May. Common practice is to then run through it, rearrange the items by the number of points they bring in and see who already got, say, a telephone book from Tokia lying around at home. Or all Bravo Hits CD’s. Or the “holy grail”.

Winning the hunTU is mainly about prestige, as there really is no prize at the end of the run. Yet, no prize seems to – in no way – mean no participation. Here’s a few reasons why:

  • It’s a great excuse to go totally crazy, and have fun with your friends while you have days off school anyways. What better way to stay off the streets by recreating the Mount Rushmore with play dough, right?
  • You can be sure you’ll measure your skills of organisation and improvisation against those of your enem-oops-fellow teams
  • You’ll gain experience in applied logistics (we’re talking TU here)

Also, going a little, or way too, over the top is in line with hunTU expectations. One of last year’s teams, the Army Ants, had their own t-shirt design, which in-explicitly asked for “Bonuspunkte”. But that seems reasonably normal compared to the teams that set aside a budget over the year. Or the team that actually has a van to get all their crazy stuff to TU. With last year’s assignments – a tire and a real window, to name a few – that sure came in handy. 

Up for the challenge? Even if you are not a TU student, you can sign up with a team of 4 to 8 people until 5 May, 23:59. Or if you consider it a little safer – just check out last year’s pictures here.  


Continue Reading
0
165 Views


Uncategorized
A class of entrepreneurs
minan Posted On March 8, 2013


You have a business idea that you want to realise, but you’re still in class? Don’t worry. The new semester is kicking off with a number of courses and initiatives targeted at university students with entrepreneurial ambitions. An increasing number of Austrian higher educational institutions is recognising the need to educate students that starting your own company is a viable career option – in order to strengthen the culture of entrepreneurship and national economy as a whole.

WU Garage: an interdisciplinary endeavour

On 7 March, the department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Vienna’s University of Business and Economics (WU) launched this semester’s interdisciplinary entrepreneurial course – Garage – Business Planning and Performance Management with an event at the Vienna Media Center to introduce the programme (the “toolbox”) and to enable informal exchange of business ideas. The concept behind this course mentored by WU lecturers Thomas Funke, Thorsten Lambertus, and Christopher Lettl is to bring together students from different universities, and therefore different areas of study, in order to develop their own idea into a sound business project. A total of 60 Masters and Ph.D. students from WU, BOKU and TU have signed up for this semester’s course, according to Funke.

“At the moment universities are like islands”

Fostering interdisciplinarity appears to be crucial. “At the moment universities are like islands,” Funke told inventures.eu. “There is almost no cooperation. Especially in entrepreneurship, the different disciplines need to work closer together. Heterogeneity is key to success for every start-up team.” Ideally, he suggests, all universities should make entrepreneurship part of their curriculum.

The interdisciplinary student teams will be coached individually by both the course mentors, and external experts from the field. A successful example of a startup that has developed from a previous Garage course is Viereck, an innovative restaurant concept, in which customers order through tablet computers.

TU !NFORMATICS INNOVATION

Another opportunity for up-and-coming entrepreneurs to get in touch with seasoned entrepreneurs, and receive their input is the !NFORMATICS INNOVATION series of public lectures, which will hold its first event on 8 March. The initiative is hosted by the Technical University in Vienna (TU), and will provide participants with the opportunity to discuss innovation cases with therespective event speakers. The goal will be to identify the Dos and Don’ts of each case, as well as the lessons learned.

Other Entrepreneurship Programmes

The need for entrepreneurship education has been recognised not just in Vienna, but also beyond in recent years and months, as universities from around Austria have launched their own programmes. Those are the Entrepreneurship and Organizational Development at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, and the Institute for Organization Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Graz, to name but a few.

Build! Gründerzentrum in Carinthia and the Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt offer the Entrepreneurship Certicate, which is designed as an additional qualification for those interested. Students from all fields of study are encouraged to participate. Part of the certificate programme is the course “BizKick,” which build! will hold this semester at the Alpen-Adria University and the Carinthian University of Applied Sciences (FH Kärnten). In it, participants are expected to build teams and spend 6 weeks developing their ideas into a sound project. As initial support, each team will get the challenging starting capital of 10 euros. 

And even for those, who have already received their university degrees (which, as famous examples show, is not necessarily a prerequisite for entrepreneurial success), there is the Founders Info Event for alumni of the University of Vienna on 14 March, starting at 17:30.

If you’re interested in other startup-related events happening around Austria this month, make sure to check out our very own selection here. 


Continue Reading
0
111 Views


Uncategorized
Finding Direction and Providing It, Too
Team Posted On November 9, 2012


At 24, Michal Lipinski-Harenberg has founded a company with two friends and landed a major deal with one of Europe’s biggest academic institutions, the University of Vienna. At the end of October, the three students of business administration launched their first product: uniVerso. The mobile app will help students find direction in university life. Finding direction has also been a personal issue for Michal: Before striking roots in Austria, he was in search of his own.

Clean cut, smart and outgoing – Michal Lipinski-Harenberg is one of the upcoming entrepreneurs in Austria. Just four months ago, he founded the company Linis with two friends, Richard Scheuerlein and Gerhard Nimmervoll. On 23 October, in time for the new semester, they launched their first product jointly with the University of Vienna: uniVerso. The mobile app is the first of its kind to provide help and direction for university students at the German speaking region’s biggest higher educational institution. Finding direction has also been a central part of Michal’s own life. Growing up in Germany, the son of a Polish mother and a German – as he later found out – stepfather, Michal was faced with questions of belonging early on. His biological father of Palestinian origin had left the family when Michal was two years old, as he learnt later on. “As I got older, I started wondering why my dad had blonde hair and why mine was black. Where do I belong to – Poland, Germany, Palestine?”, Michal reflects. “So, I have dealt with finding direction myself for a long time.” As a young entrepreneur in his own right, Michal, it seems, has found direction with uniVerso by providing it to others.

Cook up an idea, build a dream team and go

Michal is not one to wait for things to happen, he takes life in his own hands. When a friend approached Michal to join him in Vienna to study, he was quick to take action. “I had a look at it on Google Street View and one week later I left for Vienna”, he recalls. Much in the same way, the idea for uniVerso was cooked up over a chat in the kitchen with his friend Richard. Michal had already gotten involved with starting up an app providing taxi services, Get A Taxi during his studies of business administration at the University of Vienna. So, when he and Richard were discussing the struggles of student life – managing your own time schedules, finding your way around the maze of lecture halls and corridors – he knew that finding a solution to these problems could be turned into business. In one of his statistics classes, Michal met the missing link to make things click – Gerhard. “Gerhard was quite the cunning fox. He had it figured out.” But Michal is fast to point out that it’s not just a good idea, know how and a certain degree of street-wiseness that matter when getting into business: “Only start a business with people that you could easily live with for at least half a year.” With a concept in mind and a dream team set up, uniVerso was almost ready to go.


 

The Erste Bank GO! Gründercenter (founder’s centre) helped the three young entrepreneurs develop a business plan and establish a company, Linis GmbH (Inc.), in order to get their product out on the market. Besides providing expertise, the GO! Gründercenter has opened doors to a business network for Linis. So, again, it was not just the idea, the brains and the chemistry that got things rolling for Michal, Richard and Gerhard. Besides being able to get in touch with other businesses and opinion leaders through GO!, all three of them are lucky enough to have a close network of family and friends that stand behind them. “My parents support me by sharing their work and life experience with me and I am blessed to have good friends that I can rely on.” Michal sums up the benefits of having people to get your back. Nevertheless, Michal, Richard and Gerhard started Linis in June 2012 financed mostly with their own savings. In September, Linis received funding of about 5.000 euros to help with product development and marketing from departure. The app itself has been programmed in collaboration with EastBanc Technologies in Berlin.

The power of persistence

Before founding Linis, Michal had already been talking to the University of Vienna for a month, trying to convince them that the app he and his friends had come up was just what they needed. After three months of continuous persuasion, the University was finally in. When the deal ensuring the implementation of uniVerso was sealed in late July, it was only obvious who Michal would get in touch with first. “I immediately sent a photo of the contract to my father”, he says with a smile, “he gave me the thumbs up.”

Financially, Michal and his two business partners are remaining modest. “At the moment we don’t take wages for ourselves and are keeping our heads above water by working additional jobs”, Michal explains his and the co-founders’ commitment. Richard works part time for an accounting firm while Gerhard supports himself by singing for a choir, the Linz based Hard-Chor. The responsibilities within Linis are clearly set. While Richard is in charge of controlling and distribution, Gerhard’s job is to connect the university with the developers by making use of his technical knowledge. Michal himself takes care of marketing and sales.

Future plans: expansion and a student card

While the three entrepreneurs are thrilled with anticipation for the launch of their app, just a year after Michal and Richard’s fateful kitchen chat, Michal is already thinking a step ahead: “We are planning to set up a student card with special discounts at our partners. Moreover, if the app is successful in Vienna, we want to expand it to one or two other universities in 2013.” Revenues will mainly be generated through commercial slots in the app. For Michal it is a personal priority to stay on the path of providing direction to others: “I would really like to share the experience and knowledge I am gaining through Linis on an academic level later on. I greatly enjoy supporting people as they implement their ideas.”


Continue Reading
0
53 Views