Since 2018,
the German Sports Aid Foundation has been recognizing the start-up of the year.
This year, the team around decathlete and student of accadis Hochschule Bad
Homburg Andreas Bechmann scooped the coveted award.
The aim of
the competition, which is sponsored by Deutsche Kreditbank and the
Werte-Stiftung foundation, is to support athletes with start-up ambitions on
their way to setting up their own businesses. To this end, Deutsche Sporthilfe
has founded the Sporthilfe Start-up Academy. The program - which is a component
of the "Springboard to the Future" funding program - offers up to 20
athletes per year the opportunity to further develop their own business ideas
through workshops and individual coaching and to present them to potential
investors in a pitch situation.
From
university to entrepreneur - the lecture hall as an incubator for business
ideas
"Preventio
- our goal is to use artificial intelligence to precisely predict tap water
pipe damage and thus prevent it," Andreas Bechmann elaborates. "We
came up with the idea for Preventio in the course of our consulting project -
where students at accadis Hochschule can systematically work on an
entrepreneurial problem in a team based on their functional or sector-specific
specialization." The path to one's own company is not an easy one: a lot
of stamina is required from the development of the idea to the founding and
finally to a company that is successful on the market. For this reason, events
such as the Start-up Academy of Deutsche Sporthilfe, which aims to give impetus
to the further development and implementation of the business idea, are
essential for young founders.
Sport,
study and entrepreneurship - success in all areas
Andreas
Bechmann has already qualified for the European Championships. Now the team
around him has been able to celebrate its first entrepreneurial successes:
Preventio was able to convince in both the public vote and the ten-minute pitch
to the jury of experts. Overall, the four-member team was able to assert itself
against six other competitors during the final pitch of the Sporthilfe Start-up
Academy last Friday, February 26, 2021, and claim the "Start-up of the
Year" award, which comes with prize money of 12,000 Euros. "We are
very pleased that we were able to deliver a convincing performance with our
idea," explain teammates Bledion Vladi and Dr. Mehran Khanjani. "With
the prize money of 12,000 Euros, we are a big step closer to developing our
prototype. This will allow us to build additional infrastructure for our
research project, which is supported by the company Mootz & Partner and
Basler Sachversicherung," adds Frederic Büdel.