A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

What a great weekend, I attended the Entrepreneurs Garage (German: Unternehmerwerkstatt) which was organized by the Aachen Found.AC project team which are the members of the Aachen Entrepreneurship Team (AC.E). AC.E is a student initiative supporting entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking at the RWTH Aachen. I am member of Thinc! a similar initiative for the University of Mannheim so it was good to see what kind of events they organize to support students getting an entrepreneurial mindset. The whole theme of the event was “The Next Big Thing in the Internet”, so I could listen to many interesting and inspiring presentations.

Long story short, what are the key learnings?

• It is always the best thing to speak about your interests and intentions, especially if you are starting a company and you need more feedback and ideas.
• Team matters. With a motivated and passionated team you can always create a successful venture. Maybe not with the first try, but then with the second or third. Good teams can handle failures but still thrive for progress and continuation.
• There are tools and instruments out there to evaluate ideas and markets. Use them to figure out the potential of your idea and your startup.
• Discussion is important, the questions and answers after the presentations have been great and valuable. The interaction between the participants made the difference in comparison to regular one-way presentations.
• No outsourcing of core competences. If you are an Internet startup, you are a technology company and a core competence is often the in-house development of the application. Without outsourcing or offshoring you have less dependencies and a higher flexibility.
• Speed of execution matters. Do it better and faster than your competition. Don’t follow or swim with the market, lead it.
• Often you must find or need the luck for the right timing of your startup. Social Networks in the year 2000? No, but portals. Pure mobile social networks in 2007? Not in Germany or the US, maybe in some years. Sometimes ideas are too early for the current markets and often just too late.

To give you an impression about the participants and the presenters, here are some links. Note: They are all in German.

• ConnectedMarketing blog by Martin Oetting
• Lummaland blog by Nico Lumma
• Everything a Startup Needs blog by Andreas Gerads
• Exciting Commerce blog by Jochen Krisch
• Imedo Health Community
• edelight social shopping
• Rudi Rockt event concept

A lot of diversity and inspiration and at least one more good idea for a small software development project that can be a profitable business. No big business, but good business. Maybe there will be a startup with the roots in this event. I met so many persons with whom I want to stay in contact with for many reasons, exciting times.

Thanks to the organizers for such an event and hopefully more events like this will spread over Germany.