As their major event in 2012, accelerate students are organizing a social entrepreneurship student conference at HHL on May 11./12., 2012. Mark the date in your calendars as this is surely going to be a great and unique experience. For more information, please contact me.

The international edition of the Financial Times ranked the M.Sc. program at HHL as the #1 program for entrepreneurship worldwide. That´s right, compared to 65 other business schools that were included in the ranking, FT sees us as the premier spot to go to for entrepreneurship. Thank you very much to everybody involved in reaching [...]

The SMILE initiative, a cooperation between HHL, the University of Leipzig, the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung and now also with AKAD, received another funding to support Entrepreneurship in Leipzig for the coming years. In the past, the Chair of Finance with Prof. Schwetzler, Matthias Tischner and Alexander Knauer has been very successful in building up this [...]

A group of 15 students from all HHL programs joined company trips in Berlin organized in November by student entrepreneurship initiative Accelerate. They visited Kochhaus, Casacanda, Team Europe and attended a lecture of Niklas Zennstroem, founder of Skype, at TU Berlin.

We were invited to present two papers at the leading German-speaking entrepreneurship conference G-Forum this year.

http://www.g-forum.de

Current M.Sc. students Nicola Marie Rabba, Thies Dibbern, Friedemann Seith and Janes Grotelüschen won the regional qualification round of the KPMG International Case Competition in Berlin. We keep our fingers crossed for the national qualification round held from March 9-11, 2012 in Berlin, and for the final on April 18-20, 2012 in Hong Kong.

http://www.kpmg.de/careers/6642.htm

As last year, several teams of HHL students participated in the regional sessions of Germany’s biggest case study competition EXIST priME Cup. We did not win the trophy this time, but one team made it to the big finals in Berlin: Denis Ranke, Hannes Koch and Wilhelm Strehl from the MBA program successfully represented HHL [...]

Another possibility to promote HHL and its entrepreneurial activities was the PAUA day, a gathering of portfolio entrepreneurs of investor Paua ventures. Here, the focus lay on the differences between a lean startup approach and a well-funded one – and a discussion on success factors for startups.

In October, HHL together with EnergieCity Leipzig, Aufbauwerk Leipzig GmbH and ZTS-Zentrum also conducted a workshop on the process to develop a valid business model out of a technical idea.

http://www.presse-artikel.org/2011/workshop-von-der-neuen-technischen-idee-zum-erfolgreichen-geschaeftsmodell-am-28-oktober-2011-in-leipzig-72973/

The Founders Bus (“Gründerbus”) visited HHL in October. During a 10-day trip to Germany to visit the best entrepreneurship hubs, 24 participants in seven founder teams stayed for two days at HHL. We conducted a workshop on Investor-Pitching with the teams and coached them in preparation for their final presentations on the last day. There, [...]