Within the Entrepreneurship course, the Management, Communication & IT Bachelor’s students examine the topic of business start-ups both theoretically and practically. Based on a case study, they work on the economic, internal company events. In this interview, lecturer Thomas Dilger and the students from year 18 talk about their valuable experiences:
Mr. Dilger, how did you come up with the idea of working with the students on a case study on the use of drones for the transport of vaccines?
A study program is designed to enable students to improve and address real-world scenarios, problems, and societal dissonance through problem-solving skills in a focused manner. In the Entrepreneurship course, in the fifth semester, we deliberately put the focus on current realistic tasks. This specially written case study involves students adapting a company in drone development and production to the extent necessary to counteract the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of drones for vaccine transport was a meaningful purpose that the students worked on as best they could over the course of a week.
As a lecturer, what are your requirements for the Entrepreneurship course?
The challenge in this case is to adapt a manufacturing company to respond quickly and flexibly to the strong demand of the current market of unmanned drones. Special attention is given to:
The course is designed to make a real-world contribution and to give students the opportunity to go above and beyond, to explore new avenues, and likewise to infuse agility into existing systems. We started with the guiding principle: "Work can be fun." At the beginning, many students thought I wasn't serious, but some groups worked far more and longer than was actually required. This intrinsic motivation and the great results show what potential the students have and what can be achieved if you put your heart and soul into your work.
In your eyes, what are the biggest learnings for the students?
From my side, I can only say that it was a pleasure to work with the Bachelor MCiT students from year 18. It was great to see the effort, work dedication and skills that went into achieving the goal. I am sure that any company that sees the outcome at the end, which came from the "learnings" of the students, would be happy to hire such employees. They do not only live the "entrepreneurial spirit", but also use it for the benefit of society.
Thank you for your cooperation!
As a lived quality-oriented feedback culture in our study program makes reflection, fun and learning success tangible and measurable, I would furthermore like to let the students themselves speak.
These lines are taken directly from the students' reflection papers and are reproduced unchanged:
„Also having a good communication infrastructure (in our case a discord server) facilitates the communication between departments immensely and is crucially important in times of Covid‐19 when personal meetings are ever more scarce. To sum it up I would say this whole lecture was great fun and provided a lot of interesting and exciting moments for me and I would just want to thank the lecturers for their great effort of organizing this for us!” Felix Mitterer
“Some of us kept working past 23:00 that day just to make things right. I learned some vital lessons and gained some experience that I will be very glad to remember in the future. The competitive-based setting resulted in a decent opportunity to apply learned skills from the last semesters and to see for oneself how well (or bad) one can perform. In my opinion this was a great opportunity to grow as both, as professional and as a person.” Filipovic Mario
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