Study

TU Ilmenau wants to anchor entrepreneurship education more firmly in the curriculum

With the Entrepreneurship Certificate at the start of the winter semester, students, doctoral candidates, but also employees of the TU Ilmenau can acquire knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship. The courses are freely selectable and sharpen competencies of the participants beyond the specialized knowledge and prepare them for the requirements in professional life.

TU Ilmenau/Ilmkubator
At the start of the Entrepreneurship Certificate, Dr. Dörte Gerhardt welcomed students who want to further their entrepreneurial education to the rooms of the Ilmkubator.

Starting with the winter semester 2022/23, the Ilmkubator start-up service of the TU Ilmenau offers a new entrepreneurship certificate. Students and employees of all disciplines can attend courses with entrepreneurial relevance from the Studium generale as well as from the Ilmkubator start-up service in the certificate. In addition, they have the opportunity to have achievements from interdisciplinary projects credited to the certificate as well as to take freely selectable external courses on the topic of entrepreneurship. At least ten credit points are required for the certificate. All participants receive an official certificate confirming their course attendance and serving as proof of key competencies in entrepreneurship.

"We want to introduce our students more to entrepreneurial thinking and action," explains Dr. Dörte Gerhardt, head of the Research Service and Technology Transfer Department at TU Ilmenau. Currently, about 90 percent of all bachelor's students and three-quarters of all master's students can take elective courses in entrepreneurship education. In the near future, the TU Ilmenau aims to further expand the offering and make it available to all degree programs. By including entrepreneurial content in its curricula, the university aims to sharpen the soft skills of its students and prepare them for the demands of their later careers beyond technical knowledge, as Dr. Gerhardt explains:

Entrepreneurship education goes far beyond teaching business skills. We teach students the entrepreneurial mindset, how to approach problems and find solutions. For engineers in particular, this mindset is important for turning ideas into innovations. They need to be able to assess whether there is a market for their product and how they can market it.

Thinking visionary and recognizing trends

Already during their studies, TU Ilmenau's Entrepreneurship Education promotes students' skills that contribute to their personal development. In various courses, they learn, among other things, to think in a visionary way, to recognize trends, to be creative, to mobilize resources, to work in an interdisciplinary way or to act sustainably. To enable more students to develop these soft skills in the future, the entrepreneurship certificate is to be expanded as early as next year. Dr. Dörte Gerhardt sees the certificate as a building block for making students more aware of entrepreneurship education. The Entrepreneurial Skills Charter, which was recently published by the Stifterverband, the Dieter Schwarz Foundation and Campus Founders in cooperation with Allianz SE, is helpful in this regard. The charter contains eleven theses developed by university representatives. They provide recommendations for action on how entrepreneurial skills can be structurally integrated into universities as cross-sectional competencies. TU Ilmenau is one of the first signatory universities of the Entrepreneurial Skills Charter. Dr. Dörte Gerhardt explains how the theses support universities like TU Ilmenau in further developing their entrepreneurship offerings:

For the first time in Germany, competencies, methods and didactics of entrepreneurship education have been officially summarized by experts. The charter thus also serves as an orientation aid to support teachers at TU Ilmenau in designing their entrepreneurship education formats and to further develop the courses offered with reference to entrepreneurship.

Contact

Dr. Dörte Gerhardt

Head of the Research Service and Technology Transfer Department