Alexander Wessel

The “Entrepreneurship and Digital Innovation” summer program offered by HEC Paris and TUM School of Management provided an exceptional opportunity for me to gain a comprehensive insight into entrepreneurship and digital innovations in a condensed timeframe. 

As a PhD student and enthusiastic engineer, I am always keen to explore emerging technologies and innovations. I am therefore well aware that digital technologies and innovations like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will lead to disruptive chances within technical products as well as their related business models. With my experience in the technical area, I was curious to understand the impact of digitalisation on the business side of a product. The summer school provided me with the opportunity to gain this understanding. I learned from the academic expertise of Professor Jingui Xie and Professor Jens Foerderer and engaged with guest speakers from consulting and food industries.

Furthermore, as part of my PhD at the Fraunhofer IWM in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich, I am involved in developing new technological innovations that could potentially be the starting point for a new startup. The summer school helped me understand the fundamental processes behind building a startup and the importance of the surrounding entrepreneurial ecosystem. The lectures by Professor Jean-Rémi Gratadour, a founder and investor himself, were highly motivating and inspired me to consider building a startup after completing my PhD.

Apart from the excellent lectures by Professors Jingui Xie, Jens Foerderer, and Jean-Rémi Gratadour, and the captivating guest speakers, I was fascinated by the cultural diversity and international environment of the classroom. The interactive lectures and group projects encouraged me to collaborate with people from four different continents, each with unique backgrounds sharing a similar driven, open, and entrepreneurial mindset.

In addition, the modern campus of the TUM School of Management in Heilbronn provided exceptional resources for the summer school. Thanks to the significant financial contributions of Dieter Schwarz, the owner of the well-known retail chains Lidl and Kaufland, to the TUM School of Management campus and his hometown as a whole, Heilbronn has become a major hub for digital technologies and innovations in Germany.

For more information about the program