Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship, understood as the identification and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities,is a central driver of economic growth, social change, and technological progress. The research area entrepreneurship at ifm Mannheim deals with the company founder and the founding team(entrepreneurs and teams), with the entrepreneurial project and the developing organization(entrepreneurial organizations) as well as with the entrepreneurial environment, in which person and project are embedded (entrepreneurial Ecosystems and innovations).

The first-mentioned field of "entrepreneurs and teams" approaches the phenomenon of entrepreneurial thinking and acting on the micro-level of the person and the close environment. Individual human capital, personality factors and behaviors are just as much a focus as team dynamics and interactions with the microsocial environment. In the field of “entrepreneurial organizations”, the analysis is at the level of newly founded companies and deals, for example, with business models or organizational forms and their influence on the performance of start-ups. Entrepreneurial thinking and acting within organizations (intrapreneurship) is also examined. A third focus of the Entrepreneurship research area is the investigation of "Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and innovations". Structures and institutions in the macro-environment are of interest here, e.g.Networks, clusters or offers of entrepreneurship education and business development, and their effects on entrepreneurial success and innovative strength of people, companies and entire economies