Coaching Concept to Improve the Sustainability Impact of Students’ Startup Ideas in an Early Stage

Abstract

As part of entrepreneurship education, since 2018 the “Startup Summer Camp” with a focus on “Sustainable Innovation” is offered at Pforzheim University. This Startup Summer Camp is designed to enable students to develop a sustainable oriented business model within 6 days. Hence, lectures and impulses on the goals of sustainable development are given. Methods for sustainability impact assessment are taught and the students are then guided through applying them on a specific innovation idea. These elements are part of the coaching concept developed. This chapter describes the coaching concept and presents the results of a survey regarding the effectiveness of coaching on sustainability aspects. Therefore, the following two research questions are to be answered within this study: How aware are the students of sustainability issues and can their level of knowledge regarding sustainability topics be increased with the coaching?Are the students able to design their startup idea in a more sustainable way and/or estimate the level of the impact on sustainability? The results of the survey show that within a very compact coaching session, an important and applicable understanding of the complexity and urgency of sustainable development can be created and applied to an innovation idea.