In the spring semester we had the opportunity to work with so many great people once again so that we first would like to deliver a big thank you – to all our course participants, partners and all the wonderful people who attended our networking events! Also a big thank you goes out to all the passionate people who made Q-Summit 2023 possible in April!
In the following we will provide you with more detailed information on our teaching activities, support programs and events.
Education
During the spring semester, MCEI offered two courses on entrepreneurship:
Our course MAN 632 Advanced Entrepreneurship is meant to deliver a deep insight into the practical side of entrepreneurship. For this purpose, students have to work on case stories taken from existing ventures in our network. Furthermore, we invite top entrepreneurs in class to tell their story and learn from their experiences. Each guest is speaking on a certain topic he has a connection with. Focus areas of the course are culture and communication, growth-oriented marketing and strategy, financing growth and corporate entrepreneurship.
Our speakers for this semester were Christian Conrad on culture and entrepreneurship, Björn Goß from Stocard, former Amorelio-founder Lea-Sophie Cramer on growth, Melina Bucher on sustainable entrepreneurship, Getsafe-CFO Daniel Treiber on scaling and Dirk Meurer from Vorwerk Ventures on venture capital.
Our accelerator courses MAN 634 Entrepreneurial Behavior and Crowdfunding Social Ventures on master level and MAN 458 Crowdfunding for Ecological Entrepreneurship on bachelor level have been taking place this semester with wonderful teams and a lot of new business ideas.
Inspirational Events
Our main events - the MCEI Startup Lounges - took place in Café Agata in the Mafinex Building.
The Startup Lounge is your place to get inspired to create something new and to meet and mingle with the Mannheim Startup Ecosystem. You can meet startups and creative minds to discuss great ideas in a laid-back atmosphere. Every Startup Lounge features an inspirational talk by a (usually early-stage) venture to get the discussion going and has some budget to cover drinks (provided by either MCEI or one of our co-feature partners).
The first Startup Lounge of this semester hosted Differgy and Mushroom. It was held with one of partners, the Hochschule Mannheim and their Center for Entrepreneurship (MARS). Togehter we are part of the project “Innovative Hochschule” , which started at the beginning of this year. To kick things off, we teamed up with the student initiative Enactus for this Startup Lounge. Enactus is a network of leaders committed to using business as a catalyst for positive social and environmental impact. Differgy and MushROOM are two startup projects connected to Enactus with a focus on social and ecological entrepreneurship.The vision at Differgy is to create a future where every autistic person feels fully integrated at work and can develop individually and experience personal and professional success. They believe that people with autism are a great asset for companies as they introduce new perspectives due to their unique perception of the world by introducing new perspectives through their individual perception of the environment and their versatile skills. By educating, training and supporting companies during the recruitment process, Differgy wants to encourage them to overcome their reservations and embrace the advantages of diversity. MushROOM aims to repurpose old shipping containers and equip them with a fully functional mushroom farm-room inside. By installing photovoltaic panels on the roof, they are planning to make the container rely only on its own, clean energy. The original concept of every container being transportable, a MushROOM will be perfect for small, sustainable business ventures especially in the agricultural sector, as it allows unused space to be employed profitably. The underlying business model is planned as a franchise where their clients would rent a container and sell the mushroom produce for a profit.
On 28 March Startup Lounge #102 followed by hosting Openstage. Open Stage includes culture and urban entertainment into the services offered by Smart Cities. Via an app it is possible to book public spaces to perform music, theatre, dance and other kinds of performing arts. Those public spaces are equipped with a technological totem that incorporate audio speakers, mixer, led lights and IoT sensors in order to create a real stage. Open Stage develops projects for smart cities and creates innovative communication and marketing opportunities. This startup Lounge was co-hosted by MARCIE, another partner of ours, the Mannheim Research Group in Culture and Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
On 02 May Startup Lounge #103 hosted MyScribe, a freshly founded IT start-up from Mannheim. The software, developed by software architect Lars Stoll (CTO) himself, is the first web app for documentation in healthcare that uses artificial intelligence to create medical reports. The idea for this arose from personal experience by the physician Ira Stoll (CEO). The app complements the existing hospital information system with a modern and user-friendly interface for admission and progress documentation of patients in hospitals. Through the use of myScribe, both process optimization and quality assurance are achieved due to standardized processes. The primary effect is a high amount of time savings (~73% of the documentation time) and resource conservation.
Our latest guest in Startup Lounge #104 was Reminisce.ai, an individual IT Career Path development tool aiming to guide IT professionals on their skill building journey given the new skill-requirements of the ChatGPT era. With reminisce.ai you can structure the development of new important tech skills into daily learning sessions. With this development tool it is possible to learn new technology in any situation, whether you are on the bus, in the gym or at home, with their cheat-sheets and quizzes, or by just playing games.
On 13 and 14 April Q-Summit, Germany's largest student-organized conference on entrepreneurship and innovation, took place. Over two days, speeches, panels, pitch battles, workshops and speed datings were organized troughout campus. As per tradition we also participated with our own tent at the Innovillage. The Innovillage is the heart of the Q-Summit and is located in the University's Schneckenhof. It is open during the conference and serves as a place to stay for participants who are not currently taking part in the events or workshops. In addition to our "MCEI tent", there were other tents of partner companies and startups. In our tent we hosted and featured eight great startups that had the opportunity to present themselves. As always Q-Summit was an amazing experience to us and many people we spoke to. We fully enjoyed to be part of this amazing fair organized entirely by students and would again seize the opportunity to thank the whole team for the unbelievable effort to make all of this happen!
More news about the MCEI
As in previous semesters MCEI kept close contact with the University of Mannheim, Mannheim University of Applied Science, the University of Heidelberg and the KIT in different formats and projects. We intensified the cooperations in the Deep Tech Hub and the engagement in the KI Garage as well as Mannheim Research Group in Culture, Innovation & Entrepreneurship (MARCIE).
A recently formed collaboration was deepened with ENGAGE.EU. ENGAGE.EU is an alliance of leading European universities in business, economics, and social sciences with rich experience in analyzing societal change. The alliance's ambition is to enable its learners to act as socially engaged European citizens and to have impact on society at large.
