Gruendungsgarage: A five-year-experience at Graz University of Technology

This semester the Gruendungsgarage starts its 10th volume, an occa-sion to analyze the development of this special education format in entrepre-neurship. 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 accelerator. Setting up university start-up accelerator programs has been a worldwide proven model that enables students to intensively develop their business idea into a marketa-ble product or service in just a few months. Since the winter semester 2017/18 Gruendungsgarage has admitted not only students but also scientific staff. Uni-versity and postdoctoral researchers of the engineering faculties 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. Because of this comprehensive service offer, one of the two located universities of applied science recently showed interest in becoming a partner of the Gruendungsgarage.