Gruendungsgarage: A best-practice example of an academic start-up accelerator

Over the past four decades, entrepreneurship has grown within universities faster than virtually any other area of intellectual pursuit. And it ap-pears that the pace is accelerating with more universities seeking to develop pro-grams and centers focused on entrepreneurship. Yet, understanding how to build entrepreneurship programs that empower and transform has remained challeng-ing for some institutions. This paper investigated the development of an entre-preneurship 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 inter-university 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 accelerator. Setting up university start-up accelerator programs has been a worldwide proven model that enables students to intensively develop their busi-ness 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 inno-vation get supported by experts and entrepreneurs, creating a business model suit-able to their scientific discoveries.