After successful completion of the module, students will have gained deep insights into the daily life of a start-up company and will be able to link the theories of entrepreneurship to real-life scenarios from their own experiences. The deep dive into start-up practice and theory allows students to develop a deep understanding of the field of entrepreneurship and guides them to apply their knowledge gained in practice to research and, vice versa, to apply their knowledge of research and theories of entrepreneurship in practice for their work or their own entrepreneurial venture.

In this course, students complete a short-term internship of at least 80 teaching hours in a young company proposed by themselves, where they are actively involved in the daily life and challenges of the startup. The subject of the course is also the writing of a reflection paper (10 teaching hours). In this reflection paper, students have to firstly present their daily life in the startup and the startup itself, secondly summarize a self-selected academic paper in the field of entrepreneurship from a renowned journal (e.g. VHB-JOURQUAL3 A+/A/B or from a FT50 journal, and in the last part combine and link their findings from the paper with their collected experiences from the startup. In doing so, solution approaches can be elaborated for problems from practice with findings from theory, or theories found can be proven or disproven by the students' own collected experiences from practice. A synthesis of theory and practice takes place.

The participating startups can be both university and external startups that are either already incorporated or have already received external funding, e.g. within the framework of EXIST funding. If there are calls for applicants from startups on our website, then the startups can of course be contacted via that, otherwise the students have to take care of finding a suitable startup themselves.

Contents

Part 1: Practical phase:

• selection of a suitable startup, contacting and organizing the practical phase
• execution of the practical phase with active participation in the daily business of the startup
• ongoing collection of the gained experiences for later use in the context of the elaboration of the reflection paper

Part 2: Literature research:

• selection of a suitable scientific paper in the field of entrepreneurship from a renowned journal
• preparation and summary of the content of the selected paper

Part 3: Elaboration of the reflection paper:

• written elaboration of the presentation of their daily life in the startup and the startup itself
• summary of the self-selected scientific paper in the field of entrepreneurship
• concluding the reflection paper by linking the insights from the paper with the collected experiences from the startup
• in the process of linking, e.g. solution approaches can be elaborated for problems from practice with findings from theory, or theories found can be proven or disproven by the students' own collected experiences from practice.

Eckdaten:

Important:

Before taking this course, at least one entrepreneurship course from the focus area Entrepreneurship must have been successfully completed!

Current calls for applications:

To the call for applications from
Prefiro

To the call for applications from 
greenable

To the call for applications from 
Mentalport

To the call for applications from 
HEADIS