Refine
Year of publication
- 2019 (2)
Document type
- Report (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Has full text
- Yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- No (2)
Course of studies
The phenomenon of social innovation is becoming an increasingly important topic with an increasing number of people implementing different types of social innovation projects. So far, little research has been carried out to understand the structure of the projects and the characteristics of the entrepreneurs and initiators behind. This study aims to close this gap by analyzing 80 social innovation projects in the fields of housing, poverty, immigration and environment as well as by examining 117 founders behind these projects. The main results suggest that the projects are clustered around the metropolitan areas of Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart and tend to be founded relatively recently. No clear tendencies and distinctive characteristics in terms of financing and organization could be observed. The social entrepreneurs tend to be of a younger age and most notably, an overwhelming majority are academics holding at least a bachelor’s degree and even more frequently a master’s degree. Generally, some field-specific differences could as well be observed, such as more engineers being active in the field of environment and more individuals with a social sciences background being active in the poverty sector. However, the findings of this study should not be generalized to the entire social innovation scene in Germany and to all its social entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship is being characterized by innovation and change. An entrepreneurial mindset possesses the ability to simplify business operation processes and consumer products as well as improving service features. Furthermore, entrepreneurship does not only result in economic growth and prosperity, it also accelerates and promotes research and development.
The economy as well as individuals benefit from such innovative inventiveness. Many governmental departments recognize the positive and advantageous effects and therefore want to support and stimulate entrepreneurial activities right from the outset. Therefore, governmental authorities introduced a numerous of different funding pro-grams in recent years, specifically designed for young entrepreneurs.
To enhance start-up activities and to increase the overall entrepreneurial spirit in Ger-many, universities need to expand their educational framework by one component, namely the Third Mission. Hence, universities are not only responsible to promote ed-ucation and research, but also to create an entrepreneurial culture as well as anchoring it in the educational system. The objective is to support and expedite entrepreneurship from its very beginning.
This paper aims to analyze current entrepreneurial business activities, specifically at German universities. Moreover, key success factors, for instance, state subsidy pro-grams as well as business cooperation’s will be presented and analyzed. Hence, the essential objective of this paper is to find appropriate and successful entrepreneurial approaches which are feasible at the Hochschule Furtwangen University.