Entrepreneurial Education in Germany Jutta Günther, Ilka Ritter IWH ...

institution focusing on the promotion of entrepreneurship namely the Business Campus Bonn-
Rhein-Sieg. This institution is a kind of mini-incubator where students can rent office space,
laboratories and conference rooms as well as receive additional operative counseling, for
example in the field of taxation and legal form. This initiative exists since 1999 and was
initially financed by the Land North-Rhine Westphalia and the University of Applied
Sciences. While the feedback to this initiative was positive, the financial burden was too high
and the initiative was thus turned into a limited liability corporation in 2004. The corporation
is now a private-public partnership between the University of Applied Sciences and the
Kreissparkasse Köln. By changing the legal status of the initiative and engaging into
collaboration with a bank, an initial weakness of the incubators was turned into a strength.
Next to financial help, the joint venture also ensures contacts and prestige.
One year after its coming into existence, the Business Campus Rhein-Sieg GmbH moved into
their new buildings on campus. Naturally, the Business Campus and the chair work together
closely as they are funded by the same bank and are able to draw on mutual networks and
corporations with businesses and research institutes alike. So far between sixty and seventy
firms were established with new projects waiting to be realized. However, the concrete
number is difficult to ascertain and the Business Campus has to rely on the students to report
back their success after leaving the incubator (students can rent rooms and the like for at most
five years). Most of the aforementioned ventures were founded while the owners were still
studying and were thus relatively small. A high share of these establishments was focused in
the service sector as this bears initially the lowest risks and leaves room for expansion. These
facts are one of the reasons for the gradual approach that most business foundations take.
Therefore, the Business Campus is an ideal partner as the counseling as well as infrastructure
offers can be intensified at any point in time. The University of Applied Science is relatively
small and has only a limited number of students in the natural sciences and informatics. Thus,
most of the students founding a firm are business students. Here, the incubator hopes for more
collaboration with outside actors and the strengthening of these fields of study. For the future,
the Business Campus hopes to act as a conduit of ideas (“Durchlauferhitzer”) for the whole
region.
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