First stu­dents suc­cess­fully com­plete Founders Kit­chen

The Founders Kitchen found its home in the newly designed Edison Room at Edisonallee 1, where it offered students space to develop and mature their ideas for over 100 days. The students worked with TechnologieFörderungsUnternehmen GmbH (TFU), taking their own ideas through various phases such as ideation, customer insights and prototyping. They wrote business plans for their start-up projects, learned how to pitch them and prepared applications for funding. Networking with the local start-up scene was also part of the program.

A wide range of start-up ideas emerged in the process: Lara Reichenbach, Stefanie Albrecht and Lea Dudik developed an interactive communication app that helps facilitate exchange between all bodies of a school community. This way, students can decide for themselves from anywhere whether they want to write to another student, teacher or even a school psychologist in case of difficulties or problems. The possibility of anonymity and short communication channels should significantly reduce the inhibition threshold to contact reference persons.

Vanessa Wendt and Simone Welte want to offer companies a way to reuse their own resources. The business idea is to use customers' plastic recyclables to produce sustainable shelves that they can then use in their own companies. The special thing about this is that their customers are offered a holistic concept where they receive a service around the clock.

Ferhat Ay and Francesca Balsamo developed a platform that aims to bring the benefits of chatbot technology to the micro-business sector. Accordingly, businesses are given the opportunity to automatically respond to pre-defined customer queries. By publishing chatbots on the platform, entrepreneurs are no longer dependent on social media platforms or their own website for contact options. Self-employed entrepreneurs without employees in particular benefit from this solution, thus offering their clientele constant accessibility. The team subsequently pitched successfully at HNU KickStart and was able to gain funding for its project.

The didactic concept of the coaches Prof. Dr. Daniel Schallmo, Prof. Dr. Jens Pätzmann, Prof. Dr. Klaus Lang and Tal Berman enabled the participants to gain new insights, apply tools, work in teams and transfer knowledge into practice.

Prof. Dr. Daniel Schallmo was enthusiastic about the results: "The students have developed on different levels during the Founders Kitchen. In addition to the technical and methodological qualifications on the subject of founding, they have also further developed their social and personal skills."