Bachelor or Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
💡 Background
There investor landscape consists of angel investors, venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, accelerators and many more. While some investors are very public about their investments and are often featured in the news having funded another start-up financing round, others remain more discreet and hide their involvements with many companies. Germany has the third most VC backed exits and has the second highest concentration of unicorns in Europe. This would not be possible if there were no investors (both individuals and their organizations) willing to invest increasing amounts of money. However, a comprehensive overview of these investors is currently lacking and there is little knowledge about their investment behavior, focus, or connections.
Thus, it is your job to identify the relevant investors and evaluate their behavior, and future developments and to visualize their interconnections, meaning, impact and dynamic interactions.
🦾Who we are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focussed on doing research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership and Teams. We want to always be early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies and organizations that shape the future.
🎯 Goals
- Identify the relevant investors in Germany or another country
- Find measures to assess their impact, focus, interconnections and roles
- Interview or survey investors as basis for comparison
- Analyze/Evaluate their differences, impact, and/or developments
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Interest in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems / Private Equity / Startups/ Social Dynamics / Investors
- Passion to get to know famous (and hidden) investors in Germany and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
Diving into Germany's Venture Capital Landscape in 2020: https://medium.com/venture-beyond/diving-into-germanys-venture-capital-landscape-in-2020-291cf4b86f2
47 Family Office Profiles in Europe: https://www.swfinstitute.org/profiles/family-office/europe
The top 11 VC investors in German startups: https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/the-top-11-vc-investors-in-german-startups
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. We would particularly welcome innovative ideas on how to identify individuals, business angels in the private equity and startup financing ecosystem e.g. collecting trace data from twitter or other digital sources, incubators, startups databases and VC portfolios, etc.
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!