📌 Key facts
💡 Background
Universities and their students can be a driving factor for innovation in a country and have a positive impact on society and the economy. Since not all universities perform the same, it is helpful to gain insight into which universities are particularly good at fostering innovation and generating unicorns that have a positive impact on the economy. Based on a report on universities already produced at TUM (https://www.entrepreneurshipranking.com/), your task is to qualitatively investigate the unicorns that were started and grown at TUM. We want to know not only who they are and what they do but also in what way TUM contributed to their success.
🦾Who We Are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused on research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership, and Teams. We are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies, and organizations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
Main goals
- Identify the unicorns that are associated with TUM
- Compare the TUM unicorns with unicorns from other national and international universities
- Compare how well incubator programs and accelerators support entrepreneurship
- Identify factors that made these startups to unicorns
- Identify TUM’s contribution to the success of these startups
Supporting goals
- Compare university rankings
- Collect key figures for German universities regarding innovation, entrepreneurship and impact in the economy
- Collect key figures for German universities regarding their impact in federal states, cities, regions
- Put the findings about German universities in comparison with international universities
- Identifying the success factors for high-performing universities
🧠Topics of Interest
- University landscape (national and international)
- Entrepreneurship & innovation
- Social Impact
- Incubator programs
- Working with data
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Enthusiasm for career management / your own brand & future / entrepreneurship / venture capital
- Ability to do sophisticated internet, desk research, and connect with practitioners
- Passion to learn more about the future and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
https://edurank.org/business/entrepreneurship/
https://valiantceo.com/best-universities-for-entrepreneurship-in-the-usa/
https://www.universityguru.com/de/business-schools--deutschland
https://www.bloomberg.com/business-schools/2019/regions/europe
https://rankings.ft.com/rankings/2869/european-business-school-rankings-2021
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside the university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to Apply
If you are interested, please contact Dr. Theresa Treffers (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!
👉 theresa.treffers@tum.de