Gruendungsgarage – A Best-Practice Example of an Academic Start-up Accelerator

Abstract

Over the past four decades, entrepreneurship has grown within universities faster than virtually any other area of intellectual pursuit. And it appears that the pace is accelerating with more universities seeking to develop programs and centers fo-cused on entrepreneurship. Yet, understanding how to build entrepreneurship programs that empower and transform has remained challenging for some institu-tions. This paper investigated the development of an entrepreneurship program called Gruendungsgarage [1]. The Gruendungsgarage is a cooperation between the University of Graz (KFU) and the Graz University of Technology (TUG). Originally it was designed as an interdisciplinary and interuniversity teaching format offered as an elective course where students were able to work on their own real business ideas while getting assistance from university experts as well as from successful practitioners with a wide range of experience. Because of its popularity and constant improvement, Gruendungsgarage became more and more professional and over time changed its format into an academic start-up accelera-tor. Setting up university start-up accelerator programs has been a worldwide proven model that enables students to intensively develop their business idea into a marketable product or service in just a few months. Since the winter semester 2017/18 Gruendungsgarage has admitted not only students but also scientific staff. University and postdoctoral researchers benefit from a wide range of Gruendungsgarage services, as technical scientists with high-tech innovation get supported by experts and entrepreneurs, creating a business model suitable to their scientific discoveries