Particularly many graduates of the University of Cologne go on to found a company. 3.6 per cent of all founders in Germany obtained their highest academic degree at the University of Cologne. That is the result of the current German Startup Monitor (DSM) 2024 by the German Startups Association and the auditing company PwC. In this year's ranking, the University of Cologne is once again the most start-up-friendly non-technical university in Germany. With almost 2,000 founders surveyed, the annual study is considered the most comprehensive survey of the startup scene in Germany. The University of Cologne occupies an outstanding 3rd place among all German universities.
The survey of founders in Germany showed that start-ups play an important role in putting research results into practice. More than one in two start-ups (55.1 per cent) worked with or received support from a university or research institutions during the start-up process. According to the authors of the study, the close collaboration with universities is considered a unique selling point of Germany as a start-up location.
Professor Dr Joybrato Mukherjee, Rector of the University of Cologne said: “Making the results of our research available to society is one of our most important goals. I’m very pleased to see that our efforts are paying off so well and that we have created effective structures to support start-ups with the Gateway Excellence Start-up Center. This also allows us to contribute to the economic prosperity of the city of Cologne and the entire region.”
The Gateway Excellence Start-up Centre (ESC) of the University of Cologne has been promoting entrepreneurial thinking and action since 2019. For example, specialised transfer scouts support spin-offs from the wide range of excellent research at the University of Cologne and make the broad range of support available to founders. The fact that entrepreneurship, innovation and digitalisation are also very important at the WiSo Faculty is illustrated not least by four start-up orientated professorships that specifically anchor these topics in research and teaching at the Faculty.
In the future, the University of Cologne plans to collaborate with RWTH Aachen University to help established start-ups to grow even more. To this end, both universities are establishing a ‘Startup Factory’ with the Start2 Group and the ‘Gateway Universities Cologne’ association. This ‘Gateway Factory Startup’ project is one of the 15 projects invited by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action to submit a comprehensive concept in 2025. As part of the ‘Startup Factories’ lighthouse competition, five to ten projects across Germany will ultimately receive up to 10 million euros over a period of five years.
- Deutscher Startup Monitor
- Entrepreneurship at the WiSo Faculty
- Professorship Entrepreneurship and Management
- Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship (Department Corporate Development)
- Professorship for Business Analytics (Information Systems)
- Institute of Econometrics and Statistics
- Gateway Exzellenz Start-up Center of the University of Cologne
