These business schools produce successful founders

WHU campus in Vallendar

WHU graduates are reorienting themselves in their careers. The training centers are adapting to this.

(Photo: PR)

keel Robert Gentz, David Schneider and Dominik Richter have a lot in common: All three are in their mid-thirties, founded a start-up at a young age and now run multi-billion dollar corporations: Gentz ​​and Schneider run the online retailer Zalando, Richter the meal kit mailer Hellofresh. And there is something else: they all studied at the same business school, at the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management. In Germany.

For a long time, local universities were not the first address for start-up founders: too academic, too bureaucratic, too unrealistic, according to the criticism. The system in the USA, on the other hand, is exemplary, where elite universities such as Harvard from David Rockefeller to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have reliably produced world-class entrepreneurs for generations – partly because the universities actively support their students’ desire to become self-employed during their studies , building networks, promoting start-ups.

This concept is now catching on worldwide – and business schools outside the USA are catching up. In a special evaluation of the Global MBA Ranking 2022 by the “Financial Times”, three European business schools made it into the top ten in the world in the field of entrepreneurship: IE and Esade from Spain – and the WHU from Vallendar near Koblenz. This makes the private university the only one in Germany to play in the same league as Stanford, Berkeley or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The venture capital company Antler has calculated that on average there is one unicorn for every 700 WHU graduates, i.e. a start-up company with a valuation of one billion US dollars or more. Together with the much larger Technical University of Munich (TUM), WHU has produced more than a quarter of all unicorns in German-speaking countries over the past 20 years, according to the analysts.

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“We are constantly working on establishing and expanding a comprehensive entrepreneurial ecosystem,” says Dries Faems, Academic Co-Director of the WHU Entrepreneurship Center. Among other things, he attributes the good performance in the FT ranking to the development of tailor-made programs for prospective founders, the practice-oriented teaching and the establishment of the Entrepreneurship Center as a central contact point for those interested in founding a company.

>> Read here: Five strategies that consultants and bankers use to make a career

The entrepreneurial spirit at the university and the alumni network also played an important role, according to the Professor of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technological Transformation. Many alumni of WHU are now part of the who’s who of the start-up scene and support young founders with know-how, contacts and capital.

Training based on the American model in Berlin

Other German business schools are also expanding their entrepreneurship programs – and are thus reacting to the changing goals of their clientele. “Traditional corporate careers are increasingly losing their appeal, many students would rather work for young companies that are more agile and entrepreneurial,” says Roland Siegers, head of the Early Career Program at the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) in Berlin. His role model is Babson College in Boston. “Babson College has become a reference worldwide with its wide range of modular courses on all aspects of entrepreneurship.”

In the USA, the university on the east coast has been one of the top addresses for academic entrepreneurship education for decades. In the national MBA ranking of the magazine “US News & World Report” she has been number one for the best American entrepreneurship program for almost 30 years, and in the FT evaluation she is in second place behind Stanford.

The most successful start-ups by students at German universities

Babson is known for its practical training concept, which ESMT is also based on. In the future, students in Berlin will dedicate themselves to their own start-up project in their second year of study or develop a corporate venture with an established company. From 2023, the university wants to offer three new courses, including a Masters in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. As in the USA, students should receive academic credits for project work – without any traditional lectures.

Isabell Puppy thinks that’s a good idea. In order to strengthen the entrepreneurial spirit, universities should promote entrepreneurship training for all stakeholders – including university administration, advises the professor of strategy and organization at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). Start-up content should be offered early on in all courses and credits should also be granted for time-consuming start-up projects. According to Welpe, external programs that are close to the university but legally outside the university have also proven their worth. The Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM) at TUM has already spawned more than 200 start-ups.

Success attracts new founders

Welpe analyzed the climate for start-ups at German universities. Unlike the usual rankings, which are essentially based on surveys, her team used CVs or LinkedIn profiles to examine where the founders of the 500 largest German start-ups studied. The number of successful start-up projects was compared with that of the students. Result: Large state universities like TUM produce the largest number of young companies.

Relative to the number of students, however, private universities such as the WHU, the HHL in Leipzig, the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, the European Business School EBS or ESCP Europe are ahead.
The start-up radar of the German Donors’ Association, which primarily evaluates measures to promote start-ups and the start-up culture, comes to similar conclusions. Here, too, WHU and HHL occupy top positions: “The private companies are doing a super job,” says co-author Eike Schröder. Specialized offers and successful start-ups attract other interested parties, a kind of fast ball effect. In general, the start-up climate at German universities has improved, according to Schröder. “Ten years ago it was still a niche topic.”

If you want to be successful as a start-up entrepreneur, you no longer necessarily have to study in the USA – especially since the German programs are becoming more and more international. “We may be based in Germany, but we don’t see ourselves as a German business school,” said WHU Dean Markus Rudolf in a recent interview.

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