Focus Days – The kick-off event for the ‘Honours Degree’

For the second year in a row, the ‘Honours Degree in Entrepreneurship’ was initiated by the Focus Days, which took place from 13^th April to 15^th April 2023. Within those three days, students had the opportunity to get to know each other, form teams, get first insights into the certification programme and reflect on their business ideas.

For us lecturers, the Focus Days were also very enriching as they gave us the opportunity to understand the students' ideas and to support them in clarifying them. Together with the teams, we were able to define what goals they would like to achieve and discuss how we can best support them in doing so.

Applications – numbers and facts

52 students with 21 business ideas originally applied for this year’s Focus Days. All in all, approximately one third of this year’s applicants (35.29%) were females. With 37% of this year’s applicants, the (former) Faculty of Philosophy was the most highly represented, followed by The Faculty of Computer Science and Informatics (30%), the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Business, Economics and Information Systems (both 9%).

In addition, we were happy to once again welcome 6 students from our partner university in Kyiv: Kyiv National Economic University (KNEU) and thus to allow those students to continue to work on their business ideas despite the difficult situation in their home country.

Who’s been chosen for Honours Degree Programme?

Finally, 6 teams, including 2 Ukrainian teams, were chosen for this year’s ‘Honours Degree’ cohort:

EMOGI

GovTechSolutions

Smart EV

HealthyFoodCourt

VRTourism

Taubenfreunde

What’s next?

The Focus Days have only marked the starting point to the programme:

During last week’s Kick-Off the the PADU restaurant the teams were able to get to know each other and network over pizza and drinks. This was followed by the Intense Phase I, where participants learned about value creation, market research and shareholder analysis, as well as prototyping and testing.

Within the next seven months, the teams will be able to further refine their business ideas through various workshops and individual coaching sessions led by experienced professionals – lecturers of the University of Passau as well as experienced start-up practitioners. The teams will present the resulting business plan and pitch deck both, at the E’Day and at the Final Event of the Honour’s Degree Programme, thus offering an ideal starting point for their next steps as entrepreneurs.

We can’t wait to learn about how the teams’ development and we are looking forward to accompanying them during the upcoming months!

Stay tuned for updates at our programme or via Social Media.