As an entrepreneurship center, the MCEI offers numerous opportunities for startups to find the support and advice they need. One especially successful program that we have established together with the excellent student consultancy INTEGRA e.V. is “Inside the Venture”, a consulting program that provides young companies with on-site teams of outstanding students to solve pressing challenges. In this project, the student consulktancy INTEGRA e.V. sent a highly skilled team to support heat2power. The project lasted from April 2013 throughout September 2013.
In 2013, we launched 4 “Inside the Venture” projects in cooperation with INTEGRA e.V. and one MCEI student project, which all brought remarkable results. One of these projects was to evaluate the market opportunities for heat2power. Heat2power is an award-winning startup in the seed phase whose technology holds the possibility to make the conversion of waste heat to electricity feasible. The idea is to address e.g. sewage plants and other applications, where state-of the art solutions would just not be productive because they need a higher temperature range in waste heat. This is enables by a unique and patented technology.
The consulting team consisting of Sandra Sester (project leader), Johanna Mader and Moritz Blum analyzed the energy market as well as the strengths and weaknesses of heat2power profoundly and used the results to conduct a critical business model analysis. At the end, they also derived pricing implications and formulated concrete action recommendations.
Besides the high quality of the project results, we found the professionalism and commitment of the team extremely remarkable and impressive. Each team member worked more than 100 hours free of charge! We are proud that we can offer such an extraordinary service to venture due to the students’ high intrinsic motivation to learn more about the startup setting and to foster their consulting skills. Many thanks from heat2power and us to INTEGRA e.V. and the outstanding project team!