Entrepreneurship@hhl

The weekend from February 7-11, eleven members from HHL's student initiative accelerate@hhl went to Hamburg to get insights into the local entrepreneurial scene.
The program on Saturday started with a presentation by Michael Trautmann, one of the founders of the marketing agency KemperTrautmann which was recently awarded the global Newcomer Agency 2009. After this impressive start the day continued to be outstanding with roundtable discussions starting with Dominik Reisig, founder of the start-up Cavi.tv followed by Michael Backes from eVenture Capital Partners. Participants of the weekend were excited about the trip and ended their visit with a very nice dinner at an Italian restaurant in the famous harbor of Hamburg.

After the succesful launch of the startup career fair last year, HHL career
services in cooperation with the Entrepreneurship program invited HHL
entrepreneurs to the second startup career fair. For a long time,
HHL-entrepreneurs have been looking for a way to present themselves in front of
HHL students to gain popularity for internship and employment. To meet this
demand and based on the discussions with many students that showed us their
interest as well, we introduced the HHL Start-up career fair. The slots fo the
fair filled very fast and we are happy to welcome these companies on campus in
April for presentations, discussions and an after-show BBQ: mycitydeal UK, Mellowball, trivago, MisterSpex, KeyX.

One of the core courses of the entrepreneurship elective at
HHL is the businessplan seminar where students develop a business plan for their
own idea and present it in front of a jury of experts. This event has been
hosted by Venture Capital firm Grazia Equity as the "Grazia Equity Businessplan
Competition" for eight years already and we are happy that this partnership
continues also in 2010. The seminar is a great way to test-drive ideas and to
get real-life feedback. Two years ago, we started to open up the seminar for
outside entrepreneurs. Here, we bring together researchers and founders with
those HHL students that want to apply their know-how on a business case without
yet having a clear own idea what kind of firm to start. This win-win situation
has received great feedback from both HHL students and the outside entrepreneurs
and praises go to the IHK zu
Leipzig - without their support we would not be able to conduct the seminar
in this form.
For our next round of the seminar from April to June 2010 the
application deadline is now open. For more information, read here
or contact us directly.

Online Optician MisterSpex from HHL alumnus Dirk Graber announced a whooping 4.5 Mio Euro revenue in 2009 - up from 0.5 Mio Euro in 2008. This is a remarkable development and we are looking forward for Dirk's future development. Read more here.

HHL`s student entrepreneurship community accelerate@hhl organized a field trip to SunCoal Industries, Wirtschaftswoche Founder of the Year 2008 of HHL alumnus Friedrich von Ploetz. 8 students from the M.Sc. and the MBA program joined together to visit the headquarters and plant of SunCoal near Berlin and exchanged experiences with Co-founder Christian von Olshausen.

HHL MBA ranked #1 in Germany, #34 in Europe by Financial Times. How cool is that!!!  http://tweet.ms/Dw, http://tweet.ms/DW

On November 12, over 50 participants koined up at HHL to discuss with serial entrepreneur Dr. Andreas Emmendoerffer during an Entrepreneurship Roundtable at HHL.

Organized jointly with the TRM institute from Leipzig University and HHL Executive Education, this event brought together HHL students with researchers and founders from the medical and biotech sector. During the presentation and the following meet and greet many new contacts between the management and research world were established. Maybe we will see another success like with the last roundtable where HHL students teamed up with a medical researcher to build up a company together. Read more here.

After two years of absence, the Entrepreneurship student intitiative "accelerate@hhl" was revived this term. Over 15 students joined up together to regularly meet and discuss entrepreneurial ideas. In addition, they focus on developing their skills to start up a business and e.g. organize several field trips to start-ups and investors in Germany to learn more about the world of entrepreneurship.

The initiative is mentored by Venture Capitalist and business builder Team Europe Ventures (TEV) which is run by Kolja Hebenstreit, Stefan Hoellinger as well as HHL-alumni Lukasz Gadowski and Pawel Chudzinski. TEV supports with contacts, coaching and presentations on start-up specific topics.

This years G-Forum
Entrepreneurship conference was hosted by the Unversity of Leipzig. This leading German conference on Entrepreneurship and Family
Business is an excellent opportunity to connect with the German research
community and sharpen HHL’s image as an entrepreneurial Business School.

Three papers from the chair of strategic management and organization were accepted for presentation and discussion: „Unternehmernachfolge in Familienunternehmen -
Untersuchungsmodell zur Analyse von Problemfeldern bei der Übergabe der
Führungsrolle“, „The Performance Implications of Fit between Strategic Behavior
and Organizational Structure in Family Firms“ and „The Strategy-Performance
Linkage and Ambidexterity Orientation in Small- to Medium-sized Enterprises“.

A family business study that the chair of strategic management and organization with Prof. Torsten Wulf recently published received large media attention. In the study, which the chair conducted together with the Munich-based family business organization Alphazirkel, Torsten Wulf looked at the impact the financial crisis had on the strategic behavior of family businesses. The results show that family businesses are much more focused when it comes to their strategy than you would assume from looking at other types of businesses. Indeed, family businesses firm strategy remains pretty stable which in turn facilitates the successful handling of the crisis. Get the full study here. Check out some of the media attention here and here and here and here.

Stephan
Stubner was invited to attend the Junior Faculty Workshop of the
Entrepreneurship division at the AOM meeting in Chicago. Hosted by De Paul
university, he spent a full day with discussions and presentations from senior
professors in the Entrepreneurship field and networked with fellow assistant
professors from London Business School, Thunderbird, University of Chicago,
Babson College and others.

Dear future students,

welcome to HHL! As many of the starting cohort of September 2009
indicated that you are interested in Entrepreneurship, please let us
provide you with a short overview of what we are offering and planning
in the coming months and what Entrepreneurship is all about at HHL.

1. Full elective Entrepreneurship: In the core course and the
elective we will address a variety of issues needed to be successful as
an entrepreneur with your own start-up but also in a business
development or consulting position. Courses within the Program for
International Entrepreneurship are e.g. (status of August 2009): M.Sc.:
Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Finance & Marketing, Innovation
Management, Family Business and Business Plan Development. MBA:
Entrepreneurship, Innovation Management, Corporate Creativity, Business
Plan Development. In many courses, we invite Entrepreneurs and
investors to discuss their experiences with you. For your cohort, we
also plan to invite guest professors from a variety of other schools,
including Technical University Munich and Lund University in Sweden.

2. Student initiative “accelerate@hhl!”: the initiative was
founded in 2000 and aims to foster entrepreneurial thinking at HHL.
Activities in the past years included the hosting of a yearly
conference with start-ups and venture capital companies, guest
lectures, company visits etc. This initative is fully managed by
students, support from the program is available. To facilitate the
initiative for this Fall, we already prepared some contacts and events
for those of you who want to be part in the initiative

- Team Europe Ventures, the Venture Capital company from HHL-alumnus
Lukasz Gadowski (founder of spreadshirt, investor in over 50 start-ups
in Germany) is happy to support the initiative with contacts and
coaching

- From our side, we will have a bi-weekly brown bag lunch to discuss
recent developments in the start-up scene and to analyze business ideas
and business models

- Start-up career fair on September 15. Here, we will have 6
HHL-start-ups visiting HHL to inform you about internship- and job
possibilities with start-ups. In a meet-and-greet with free food and
drinks after the presentations, you will have the possibility to
discuss directly with the entrepreneurs and network with fellow
students. Focus here is then more on the experiences from starting up a
business.

- Planned events (contacts already in establishment): Start-up tour
in Berlin and in Leipzig to visit several start-ups; Entrepreneurship
Round Tables, etc.

3. Program International Entrepreneurship: Besides the courses and
the support for accelerate@hhl! we additionally offer coaching and
networking through the program. Thus when you have a question or need
advice, feel free to contact us.

To keep you up to date on a running basis, we also send a regular
newsletter about entrepreneurship activities at HHL (the latest version
is attached below). In between newsletters you can get information on
the blog. Some useful links are: Program International
Entrepreneurship: http://www.hhl.de/entrepreneurship, Blog: http://www.unternehmer-hochschule.de, a recent interview (in German) which talks a bit about the program: http://www.foerderland.de/419+M5eabe132bd3.0.html.

Finally, some events you should consider to attend:

- September 15: HHL Start-up career fair (see above, more information will follow once you arrive at HHL)

- September 19: Workshop Unternehmensgründung: Team Europe Ventures
is hosting an event on building up start-ups in Berlin. HHL is partner
of this event – more information will follow in a separate mail.

- October 2: Ebspreneurship – European Business School now also
started an own student initiative for entrepreneurship. This is going
to be their first event. (www.ebspreneurship.de)

- October 9-10: IdeaLab! – WHU students have been organizing this
event for 3-4 years now. Regularly, HHL students join our peers at WHU
for ideaLab!. Great speakers, intense workshops! (www.idea-lab.org)

Hope to see you soon in Leipzig. If you have any questions before you arrive, please let us know.

Stephan Stubner

Torsten Wulf

Last week, we sent out our Newsletter to over 2.500 recipients.

The reputed publication Internet Business World awarded the 2009 price for the best start-up to Playnik, the gaming company founded by HHL-alumnus Malte Paul (K10).

Among the 20 finalists was also smava, a micro-financing platform where HHL-alumnus Sebastian Rieschel (K11) is in the founder team.


Read more about Playnik's success here.