Finalist

Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award

Nikolaus Franke

Finalist of the Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award

WU Vienna - Austria

"Making the Schumpeter country an entrepreneurial society again"


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Summary

Only two decades ago, entrepreneurship played hardly any role at WU Vienna and in Austria in general. The Austrian mentality seemed to have lost sight of its once impressive entrepreneurial tradition incarnated by iconic figures such as Joseph Schumpeter or Peter Drucker. Values and norms such as opportunity-seeking, risk-taking, and the need for independence only played a minor role in education, media, and generally in society. Thus, when I started as a Professor here, I faced a prototypical start-up situation. I saw the potential and had a vision, but resources were scarce, scepticism was strong, and the challenge appeared unsurmountable.
However, having experienced the almost miraculous effects of unleashed entrepreneurial power during my guest professorship at MIT, I started my own entrepreneurial journey with a small and highly motivated team here at WU. Key to the success was our applied problem-solving approach in teaching, where we collaborate with start-ups and innovative companies. Through highly attractive courses and successful projects, we have attracted talent among students and created a strong momentum as also more and more partners would collaborate with us. We launched many additional initiatives and innovated wildly. This allowed us to grow fast and foster entrepreneurship at our university into “the” hot topic. Our fantastic entrepreneurial students and alumni have helped creating a lively and fast growing entrepreneurship ecosystem in Vienna and Austria in general. My role is to keep this entrepreneurial spirit in order to recognize and exploit further opportunities!

Key People


Prof. Eric von Hippel
Full professor
Sloan School of Management,  MIT



Prof. Karim Lakhani
Full professor
Harvard Business School,  Harvard University



Prof. Christian Lüthje
Full professor
Institute for Innovation Marketing,  Hamburg University of Technology



Prof. Marc Gruber
Full professor
Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization,  EPFL Lausanne



Prof. Christoph Hienerth
Full professor
Chair of Entrepreneurship,  WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management



Prof. Reinhard Prügl
Full professor
Innovation, Technologie und Entrepreneurship,  Zeppelin University



Prof. Dietmar Harhoff
Full professor
Innovation and Competition,  Max Planck Institute



Prof. Martin Schreier
Full professor
Marketing Management,  WU Vienna



Dr. Rudolf Dömötör
Director
Entrepreneurship Center,  WU Vienna



Prof. Peter Keinz
Deputy Director
Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation,  WU Vienna



Dr. Peter Vandor
Director
Social Entrepreneurship Center,  WU Vienna



Dr. Klaus Marhold
Post Doc
Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation,  WU Vienna


Acknowledgements

My former colleagues Prof. Joseph Mugler and Prof. Oskar Grün helped me getting to WU Vienna and were invaluable mentors particularly in my early years here. Former Rector Prof. Christoph Badelt was an early strong supporter of the institute and me. My own doctoral supervisor Prof. Eberhard Witte (who passed away in 2016) was the single most important inspiration and mentor in my academic life – a truly entrepreneurial professor.
Most acknowledgements, however, should go to our faculty and particularly our entrepreneurial students and alumni. I believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught in the sense of “transforming” an individual – what is possible is sparking the entrepreneurial flame and thereby freeing the inner potential for innovation and change. I am grateful for all the engagement, motivation, ideas, energy, crazy out-of-the-box thinking these wonderful people demonstrated when having the opportunity!

Images

Changemaker Program - Fostering the next generation of entrepreneurs

E&I Club and Alumni Network

Entrepreneurship Avenue - Europe's largest student entrepreneurship event

Entrepreneurship Center Network - Connecting with other Austrian universities

Entrepreneurship events that connect people and ideas

Social Impact Award - Entrepreneurial students working for good causes

Touchdown - Celebrating student projects

A 10 year old girl who had participated in the Changemaker program organized an entrepreneurship workshop

Networking event for students and ecosystem stakeholders

IMPACT STORY

Impacting lifes

I could tell very many touching yet somehow “conventional” stories. Very many of our alumni and students report how the courses and projects changed their minds, made them think and act entrepreneurial, and how the experience of responsibility and empowerment ultimately altered their careers and lives. It is touching when you learn that former E&I students named their kid after me.
However, two other (short) stories illustrate my gratitude to the impact we have even better. In the Changemaker program, we help 10-year-old kids organizing a small start-up that offers their products or services on campus. The enthusiasm of the children is touching and gives reason for hoping for a truly entrepreneurial generation. Once, I received a mail from a proud father who told me how much this experience meant for his little daughter – a formerly shy girl has started workshops evangelizing entrepreneurship, thereby spreading the value of opportunity recognition and exploitation among her friends and relatives. I am so grateful that we enable such wonderful effects!
Other unusually touching moments result from many of our Social Impact Award projects in which we help early-stage social entrepreneurs tackling crucial societal challenges. Just as one example: The project “Motorica” designs body-powered limb functional prostheses and systems of rehabilitation for children – the cool designs let the young patients accept their disability in a better way and thereby improves their lives considerably.

LEARNINGS

Lessons learned

Many people think that the ideal entrepreneurship professor should engage in starting a (commercial) start-up in order to be able to experience what he or she is preaching. While I agree that own practise is invaluable and ivory tower “theoretical” entrepreneurship educators are somewhat similar to theoretical swimmers (), I have devoted my creativity, energy, and time rather on starting-up academic institutions, such as the E&I Institute, the Entrepreneurship Center, the Entrepreneurship Center Network, and many other initiatives. The challenge is more or less the same as with commercial start-ups – recognizing an opportunity (in my case: related to entrepreneurship education), raising resources necessary (in my case: funds, people, and university support), developing an innovative offering (in my case: courses, projects, initiatives etc.) that meets the preferences of customers (in my case: students, company partners, faculty etc.) in a fast, iterative and lean way, shaping and leading a team (in my case: faculty or admin staff), dealing with competition and resistance (in my case: internal from other institutes and departments and external from other institutions), diffusing it in the market and further adapting it to the strategy – or the strategy to the offering. I can just say that in my case, the result was a similar learning experience, and the leverage was probably much greater.

FUTURE PLANS

What's coming?

An entrepreneur is never content and the universe of opportunities is infinite. We have concrete plans regarding the roll-out and expansion of all existing initiatives described (e.g. making the Changemaker program a national initiative). Beyond this, we plan starting many new projects and institutions, some more incremental, some more radical.
An important area will be the expansion of our digital (online) offerings. COVID and all the lock-downs forced us into something that can be seen as a giant natural experiment. We currently evaluate many of the solutions we had to improvise and consider implementing them also in post-Corona times because they worked so well. One example is our digital matching platform in which we enable business students and alumni to connect with inventors and technology experts and vice versa. First experiences and resulting founding team matches are very promising.
However, many future developments are hard to predict. Recognizing and exploiting the resulting opportunities requires openness, creativity, and agility. Thus, probably my most important plan for the future is to keep our well-working established institutions and all its members entrepreneurial - making the Schumpeter country an entrepreneurial society again is a long-term vision!


KEY STATISTICS

100 members (professors, lecturers, teaching assistants etc.)

The Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation I founded in 2001 and have been leading since then is the leading academic institution for entrepreneurship in Austria, responsible for teaching and research

> EUR 12.5 Mio.

Third party funding of the institute (mostly used for employing further faculty and increasing the number of students that are able to attend our programs)

1,000 practice projects conducted so far

Projects in which our students developed entrepreneurial solutions together with (external) founders, start-ups, SME, and multinationals for their innovation related problems, challenges, and opportunities

> 100 awards

Mostly for projects and courses (e.g. business plan competitions, educational awards etc.)

> 3,500 graduates

Students who successfully completed (1) our specialization in the Bachelor (total of 5 courses), (2) the Master SIMC in which entrepreneurship is one of the three pillars, (3) the MBA on Entrepreneurship & Innovation

> 10,000 visitors

At E&I Touchdown, the bi-annual flagship event in which students showcase their projects to the entrepreneurship ecosystem

> 750 start-ups

Conservative estimate of the companies founded by our students and alumni

> 50 international guest professors

Scholars from world leading schools such as MIT, Harvard, PennState etc. are part of our global network and support our entrepreneurship education efforts. Moreover, the institute hosts the Fulbright - Kathryn and Craig Hall Distinguished Chair for Entrep

49,000 participants in 26 countries

Social Impact Award (SIA), an initiative to support young early-stage social entrepreneurs

> 60 members (academic faculty, event organizers, communication managers, consultants, etc.)

The Entrepreneurship Center I founded in 2015 and have been leading since then, increases awareness for entrepreneurship among students and supports students and faculty in starting a business

> 20,000 participants

At the many hundred events

> 1,000 start-up teams

Actively supported and consulted

2,000 10-year-old children from 60 schools

Participated in the “Changemaker” program, received age-appropriate entrepreneurship education and showed their skills by developing and selling hand-made products

Network of 25 universities

The Entrepreneurship Center Network (ECN) I founded 2012 supports interdisciplinary collaboration and helps to overcome silo issues

11,000 participants from 150 universities worldwide

The “Entrepreneurship Avenue“ (organized by ECN) developed into the largest European entrepreneurship event for students

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