Making a positive future impact on the world

How did the idea for the hub come about?

When I started at KLU one year ago, I was thinking how we can develop a future mindset, a future, upskilled culture at KLU. The majority of students were focusing on traditional careers, but even in traditional careers you need to have innovative skills and future skills and be open and brave. Everything I do is under the understanding that entrepreneurial skills are relevant for every career. I wanted to build an ecosystem where everyone that wants to found a startup can, and where it’s also possible to become a futurist and visionary in an established company, for example. Where you can be the owner of your career and of your projects and create new possibilities.

What do you mean by students taking ownership?

It means, for example, that if they have a problem with something, rather than saying, “I don't like that, I want it differently”, they say, “I don't like that, I can do it differently”. That they have the power to change something. So, we teach entrepreneurial skills like ideation. I have a problem, what can I do about it? So that's the ideation part, and then you think about who's involved, who you need to convince, what kind of resources you need, and so on. We are teaching them how to take ownership and how to thrive in their careers.

How does the hub empower students to achieve this?

For starters, we created a workshop series focusing on the idea that entrepreneurial skills that are relevant for every career. Together with various corporate partners and startup founders, we look at different entrepreneurial skills such as the aforementioned ideation, and stakeholder management.  With the logistics solutions firm HHLA Next we also defined how to build a business model and that was very interesting because it opened up the world to our KLU students by showing them how even established companies can, in this case, build speedboats to have a sustainable competitive advantage and actively create the future. Beyond that, I'm currently working on bringing business challenges into lectures, building bridges between the industry and academics.

I’ve also created a funnel with four different phases: disrupt, empower, activate and incubate.

The disruption phase demonstrates there is more possible than only having a traditional mindset and traditional management career.

Then we have the empowerment stage, where I help students get experience and enhance their entrepreneurial mindsets through workshops and tutorials on ideation, problem solving, embracing the fail, and so on.

Activation involves incorporating business challenges in close partnership with professors and potential corporates into lectures. For example, we’ve developed a business challenge for MBA students in August together with HHLA Next.

Finally, there is the incubation phase for students and alumni who want to found startups, with mentorships, perk partners, and peer-incubation.

What activities and events does the hub have coming up?

We’re building a tutorial platform on Moodle which will provide guidance and materials on enhancing an entrepreneurial mindset and how to found a startup. Additionally, we’ll be working with the Entrepreneurship Initiative from Berlin, who have a peer learning online platform for founding startups that we’ll provide for students. Of course, we’re working with many different partners from Hamburg to support potential founders and I will be doing some one-on-one advisory work.

Also, a Hamburg project called Impossible Founders won a state-funding competition and we are a smaller partner in it. We want to work closely with them, opening up everything we do for the other Hamburg universities involved in the project. On 18 November, our event Beyond Now: The Day for Joint Future Creation will take place, featuring more than 10 corporates, including HHLA Next, retail consultants Bandtworks, Kühne & Nagel, and Sovereign Speed, as well more than 100 students, who will be “time traveling” to 2040 to solve business challenges set by the businesses.

What advice would you have for students wanting to make a difference in the world of business?

Empower yourself to create not only your world but also the world of other people. The best goal you could possibly have is to make your impact as high as possible. If you upskill yourself as much as possible and have future skills, you can basically create whatever job you want to have, whether it’s founding a startup or working for a business. You can be one of the people creating the future.