13 February 2023 | Münster
Last Monday, representatives of the S2BMRC, the University of Münster (WWU) and the University of Twente came together for a reissue of the "Exploration Workshop - Entrepreneurship", a collaborative event between the universities. While the three universities have already engaged in a strong collaboration on entrepreneurship matters for several years, this workshop was targeted at exploring opportunities to strengthen the collaboration on joined impactful entrepreneurship research. As such, around 20 professors, PhD candidates, and academic staff from the entrepreneurship centers of the universities participated at the workshop to meet and connect to fellow researchers, engage in discussions on shared topics, and explore opportunities for potential research and practice collaboration projects.
Following up on the first workshop of this event series held in Enschede, the Netherlands, in March 2022, this exploration workshop was organized by the S2BMRC and WWU and took place at the REACH Euregio Start-up Center in Münster. After a quick introduction by Prof. Dr. David Bendig from the WWU, S2BMRC team member Dominik Lappenküper continued to moderate the workshop and guide through the diverse sessions.
To be able to explore collaboration opportunities, the first session started with a self-developed network game in which the participants were asked to build a network of the participating researchers' topics and future research interests visualized as keywords. Given a stack of cards including the names and research topics, three smaller teams tried to not only visualize matching topics and topic clusters but also find new interesting topic combinations that could lead to future research projects.
For the second session, the smaller teams used the insights from the network game to develop future collaboration ideas that can be turned into specific goals and broken down into actionable short-term tasks in an interactive working session. As each team was free to select an own collaboration topic of interest, this session led to three initiatives with 9 actionable tasks in only 60 minutes.
After a lunch break and a guided tour around the start-up center, the participants engaged in a discussion on 'Research Journeys' in which the planning, execution, and finalization stages were highlighted by Acting-Prof. Dr. Sue Rossano-Rivero, Prof. Dr. David Bendig, and Ass.-Prof. Dr. Rainer Harms. Subsequent to the short introduction into the subtopics by the professors, all of the participants engaged in an open discussion to share good practices but also shine light on typical challenges in research projects.
To finish off this rich workshop, the participants summarized and recapped the key collaboration topics that were explored during the sessions. Moreover, each team developed one actionable small task into a micro and nano task as an immediate follow-up after the workshop's ending. After the intense work done, the participants were invited to stay for an afternoon tea.
We can summarise - This is an engaged university collaboration! We are looking forward to the next workshop and all future collaboration projects that were developed.
