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Summer School Social Entrepreneurship - From a sustainable idea to a business model

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  • SPRING
Idea generation for a potential start-up © Pixabay

What methods do I use to get from an idea to a business start-up? This question was addressed by the international students of the SPRING Master's pro­gram in April 2021.

For the fifth time, the de­part­ment hosted the summer school for students of the SPRING Master's pro­gram in cooperation with the Impact Hub Ruhr. For the 2nd time, the three-day course took place online and seven students from other DAAD-funded Master's programmes with a development focus throughout Germany were also able to participate.

Like in a start-up, participants can try out and develop a business idea on the basis of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals up to the point of founding a company. In order to put this idea on a solid economic footing, speakers from the field will teach methods and practices of entrepreneurial thinking and action as well as from the areas of marketing and financing. In a final short presentation ("elevator pitch"), the students experiment with summarising and presenting their business idea to investors or financiers.

In four teams, the students developed solutions based on a self-defined and subsequently analysed problem. The winner was the team "10 TK 10 Vitamins", which presented a plausible model of collecting food near its expiry date in India, compiling it into packages according to nutritional values and organising both transport and sale at favourable conditions to slum residents.

Contact: Dr. Anne Weber