This year I visited the Entrepreneurship Summit 2018 at the FU Berlin. Besides the speakers and visitors the inspiring lectures were especially interesting: We talked about blockchain, copy tracking, sustainable management and more.
How to turn small into powerful?
Setting up your own business is like fighting David against Goliath, which usually takes years. This is why 80 percent of founders fail. But Prof. Günther Faltin, the founder of Tee Kampagne, also encouraged young (future) entrepreneurs. If you don't know everything about something, this unbiasedness can be an advantage for developing an innovative solutions. While for real estate the three most important factors are location, location and location. It is the (innovative) concept, concept and concept for a business start-up. From Prof. Faltin's point of view, the fire brigade of the future will extinguish data; anyone who becomes self-employed in this field could possibly become very successful. As e.g. the amount of electricity used by computers mining Bitcoin so far this year eclipses the annual usage of countries like Ireland and most African countries (source).
How to plan your business?
Also the www.gruenderplattform.de by Mathias Langer was interesting. Here you can create business models and search for potential investors who match your (own) registered model. I only wrote a business model for walk this way this year and have to admit that I have been working much more efficiently ever since. Such a model costs time, but leads me through the business year in a very targeted way. Since 2018 was my most successful year, I would immediately write a business plan when I founded my next company. A book recommendation would be "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers" by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.
Am I sustainable?
From Christian Kreiß I heard a lecture about sustainability. An average household owns over 10,000 products. When I counted my drawer (a drawer, mind you) of my desk, I already found out 145. It is inconceivable that the metaphor "Löffel abgeben" is historically rooted in the fact that in the past only the man of the house ate with a soup spoon and passed it on to his eldest son with his death. Whenever I am tempted to buy something by 3,000-13,000 commercials every day, I try to remember these numbers. Even when it comes to clothing, I always think about whether I put on the shirt at least 30 times and whether I pay attention to the workmanship of the materials and the place of production.
Entrepreneurship Summit
Prof. Günter Faltin has been organizing the Summit since ten years. The Entrepreneurship Summit is like a family reunion. The family includes all those who would like to have a different, intelligent economy and want to help shape it. The Summit shows that starting a business today has nothing to do with the current status quo and can therefore be successfully implemented for almost everyone interested.
Summit highlights 2018
In addition to the many great keynotes and great discussions, the proof-of-concpet competition was the highlight for me. For the first time since the launch of this format in 2013, all Entrepreneurial Designs made sales at the Entrepreneurship Summit. This is proof of the basic quality of the founding concepts.
2019 the focus will be how to make good products cheaper.
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pic by Benjamin Egerland
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