The Entrepreneurship Center at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management has a goal: to reinforce the entrepreneurial spirit on campus and support the WHU community in its commitment to the focused and sustainable founding of new companies. To strengthen this mission, the WHU Entrepreneurship Center now integrates subject-specific offerings from Microsoft into its activities. By doing so, the center’s entrepreneurial ecosystem receives support from the globally active technology corporation for its projects and programs relevant to start-ups, as well as gains access to its expertise. Notably, WHU is an excellent incubator for start-ups in particular: Relative to the size of the student body, WHU produces the most start-ups and business unicorns in Germany, as evidenced in the Unicorn Founder Roadmap published by venture capital firm Antler.
One of the ways in which the WHU Entrepreneurship Center is now involving Microsoft is in the seven-week WHU Accelerator Program, which sees a group of mentors advise founding teams during the earliest stages of developing their companies and help their business models take shape more quickly. Microsoft will also work with WHU Startup Academy, a student-led club that organizes a two-day conference for high school students (starting from grade ten). There, participants are motivated to explore self-employment and, at the event’s workshops, learn the building blocks of starting a company. With Microsoft for Startup Founders Hub, the company also promotes tech-focused founders and potential future unicorns. Additionally, Microsoft actively supports the Data Driven Entrepreneurship course, part of the master’s programs at WHU, by providing instructional material to introduce students to the Power BI tool, which allows information to be converted into visual dashboards.