How are our entrepreneurs in residence doing? Today: Jan and Patrick from S4X.Group

Before we became "Entrepreneurs in Residence", we had already been busy with our startup, S4X Group, for some time. Through funding programs, competitions and accelerators, we were able to gain some experience and generate attention. So for the program, we aimed to further develop our startup project.

In order to create a symbiosis between the further development of our start-up and the progress in our master studies, we decided to write our student research project within the Entrepreneurs in Residence project at ENI. We wanted to validate our product idea and get a better feel for the market as part of our student research project entitled "Analysis of digitalization potentials in medium-sized companies in the manufacturing industry". Accordingly, we created an interview guide to be able to talk to senior executives or managing directors/managing directors of companies in our target group. Medium-sized companies with less than 500 employees or owner-managed companies were chosen as the target group, as they were considered to have the highest chances of getting in touch with the right people.

Our analysis of the interviews is not yet complete, but initial findings have already been made. In some of our interviews, the interviewees reported two main challenges:

• No knowledge about their customers
• Employee satisfaction as an important element of a productive work environment.

In an attempt to address both of these issues, we came up with an idea that we later christened Surveymugs.

You combine a normal coffee cup, as you find them in abundance in the coffee kitchens of German companies, and print a QR code on it. The URL to which the QR code refers can be changed at any time in our backend. The result is a simple tool that attracts the attention of your own employees or can be sent to customers. On the one hand, the dynamically changing link can be used to refer to a homepage, or news and offers can be presented. On the other hand, a survey can also be stored in order to query customer or employee satisfaction.

When we further detailed the concept, we realized that the Surveymugs also represent an ideal opportunity for ENI to further pursue the goals of the institute and our project and to increase the awareness of the institute and its offers.

While we had the opportunity to talk to many people from the industry during our interviews and visits, no pressing cross-company problem had emerged in relation to the production processes of all companies. However, the realization emerged that supporting processes in particular could make a major contribution to productivity. Furthermore, in the course of our research, we became more intensively involved with the topic of questionnaires and survey tools for the first time. As already mentioned in the previous paragraph, the idea for the Surveymug was born.

Accordingly, an ENI Surveymug cup will be created in the next few weeks, which can be distributed to various student bodies in order to bring knowledge about entrepreneurship to the student environment of the University of Stuttgart in a subtle, yet fascinating and surprising way.