Driving Innovations - Mindset Change

Dr. Clemens Ackermann (Deputy Managing Director & Research Coordination, ARENA2036) and Dr. Andreas Wahl (scientist) were guests at the GRADUS Lounge on July 05, 2022. For the participants, there were exciting innovation impulses as well as a guided ARENA2036 tour and the opportunity to exchange ideas with the other participants in a relaxed setting.  

Clemens Ackermann spoke about how to increase the innovative power of a region through ecosystem innovations in co-creative collaboration and with interdisciplinary partners from science and business. Andreas Wahl used the event as an opportunity to talk about how it is possible to enable more innovations from the academic milieu. 

Promoting young scientists is an important concern of ENI, GRADUS and its partners. Moreover, many groundbreaking discoveries are made at universities. However, turning scientific ideas into innovative applications is not the primary goal of higher education. A change in thinking must take place here, because research shows: Too much potential is being wasted!

For this reason, ENI took the GRADUS Lounge as an opportunity to present its idea of a holistic, sustainable approach to sensitize and qualify doctoral students and post-docs for the topic of entrepreneurship. This should make it possible to raise more potential and awaken the spirit of founding also among PHDs, post-docs and professors: Elements4Founding "E4F".

E4F will start in summer 2022 and invites all PhDs, postdocs and professors at the University of Stuttgart to get started on the path towards entrepreneurship with a wide range of compact courses, workshops or extended in-depth coaching. Alexander Brem, Director of ENI, also can't wait to get started with the program: "I know that we have so much technical expertise and such a strong and broad field of research at the university, which is just called for the path to entrepreneurship. That's why I'm all the more pleased that we have found a partner in the Vector Foundation that supports us in awakening the spirit of entrepreneurship among academic staff as well. With Marcel and Kathrin, we have also been able to put together a project team that really lives entrepreneurship! I'm really excited about what's in store for us."

If you would like to know more about E4F or are already interested in participating, you can find out more here: https://www.eni.uni-stuttgart.de/transfer/projekte/ or directly from Kathrin and Marcel. In addition, you can always get the latest news about the project via our newsletter: https://www.eni.uni-stuttgart.de/transfer/newsletter/.