KBE students visit StartUp-Safary in Berlin

Students from the MSc programme Knowledge-based Entrepreneurship (KBE), at the School of Business, Economics and Law visited an event in Berlin organized by StartUp-Safary. The students took part in networking events and had personal interaction with experienced businesspersons about the development of a company from seed to success. One of the main learning points has been the importance of confidence and personal traits of the founder as they face challenges. Below follows a short travel report by Simon Bengtsson.

Travel report

The KBE class of 2016 visited StartUp-Safary in Berlin 28th-31th of October. The choice of Berlin as the destination was because of its reputation of being the home of inspiring and successful entrepreneurial companies characterized by rapid growth, especially in the ICT-industry. Additionally, many Swedish people have moved to Berlin with their companies, making the geographical connection present.

The concept of the StartUp-Safary is to visit companies in their office environment and learn from their experiences. The organizer made up to 15 sessions available for every day of the event so there was always something for everyone to visit. The companies ranged from larger online businesses, smaller start-ups and global banks. The events included networking mingles, pitching contests, workshops etc.

We were a group of 15 people from the class that joined the event and since we spread out on different sessions the impact of the events increased with a widened contact network for the combined class. In the talks together with the companies it was understood that many of the fields that we study in class, such as design thinking are used in the start-up world. These insights were discussed with many of the founders and they were interested in keeping the contacts further on.

Many of the companies were looking after expanding their business internationally and in that way were able to gain insights from the talks together with the KBE-class representatives. These chances of networking are stressed throughout the Masters programme and can be seen as the main reason for this study trip. Furthermore, in the talks potential research questions were formed that can lay as a foundation for our upcoming Master’s thesis in the spring of 2016.