More female power for Baden-Württemberg: Female Foundership in focus!
The topic of female entrepreneurship or female foundership offers a huge range of creative & highly relevant business models and Baden-Württemberg also has a large number of success stories of inspiring female founders. Nevertheless, current surveys show that women are still underrepresented in entrepreneurship.
The "Start-up BW Female Accelerator" pilot project was set up as part of the Start-up BW state campaign in order to increase the percentage of women in the start-up scene. The project aims to increase the visibility of female start-ups in Baden-Württemberg and to inspire more women in the fields of entrepreneurship, foundership and start-ups.
4 building blocks for holistic support
Our activities in detail
Project module I: Female Founders Accelerating Agency (FFAA)
The FFAA supports female founders by providing advice and pooling approaches, develops measures to increase the visibility of female founders and documents the number of female founders in Baden-Württemberg. It creates reliable access to financing opportunities, promotes the transfer of innovation and coordinates competition formats. In addition, it analyzes existing offers, identifies funding gaps and networks regional players. Press work and coordination with federal initiatives are also part of its tasks.
Project module II: Visibility
This module focuses on making female entrepreneurship visible and raising awareness of it and provides inspiration for women interested in starting their own business. To this end, success stories will be disseminated via social media and other channels and a podcast called "Female Founders Insights" will be created, in which inspiring stories of successful female entrepreneurs will be presented, insights into their personal backgrounds and challenges will be provided and supporters and leading figures in the female start-up ecosystem will be invited. The Female Accelerator will also actively participate in various events to ensure a visible presence and opportunities for networking and creating synergies with other players from the start-up ecosystem.
Project module III: Train-the-trainer
In this module, a workshop concept is developed to sensitize and qualify stakeholders for the needs of female founders. The focus is on overcoming the "confidence gap" and supporting female founders and coaches within the start-up ecosystem through the intermediary level.
Project module IV: Female Founders Community
In addition to the structural approach, the Female Founder Community in Baden-Württemberg is to be activated. Female talents, female founders, people from the management level in business, industry and science are to be identified and networked with each other. This should create reliable access to the established economy and improve financing opportunities for female founders.
Female founders and ecosystems in focus
Promoting female founders
- increase visibility & provide inspiration
- facilitate access to financing
- create future potential
- support competition formats
Strengthening ecosystems
- offer innovation transfer
- identify funding gaps
- optimize consulting services
- utilize regional synergies
Inspiring female founders from our visibility campaign
Every two weeks, we present an inspiring female founder and her start-up. You can find all the portraits on the Start-up BW website and on our LinkedIn account.
Upcoming events
The Start-up BW Summit 2024 is a trade fair and congress in the Haus der Wirtschaft with exhibiting start-ups, pitches and keynotes plus a festival on the Börsenplatz with music and informal discussions - right in the heart of Stuttgart. Start-ups, representatives of start-up ecosystems and companies as well as investors from Baden-Württemberg, Germany, Europe and the world meet here to pitch, network, exchange ideas and learn from each other.
Participation is free of charge, registration and all information at https://summit.startupbw.de.
Past events
We invited guests to the public kick-off of the Start-up BW Female Accelerator on January 29, 2024 from 12.30 p.m. in the Neue Schloss, Foyer Weißer Saal, in Stuttgart.
The event was opened by Dr. Hoffmeister-Kraut, Minister of Economic Affairs, Labour and Tourism Baden-Württemberg, and marked the launch of the campaign to raise the profile of successful female start-ups, which is being implemented as part of the Start-up BW Female Accelerator.
Three of these inspiring female founders from Baden-Württemberg took part in an exciting panel talk with Minister Dr. Hoffmeister-Kraut. The final get-together provided an opportunity for exciting discussions and valuable networking.
The event, which was part of the Start-up BW state campaign, was opened at 11.00 a.m. by Dr. Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut, Minister for Economic Affairs, Labour and Tourism of Baden-Württemberg.
The intention of the Female Founders FINANCING Forum was to create a platform for the investment and banking world, for female founders and their innovations and for the start-up ecosystems. It is intended to showcase the diversity of different ideas, approaches and offers relating to female financing/female investing, initiate the transfer of know-how among those working in the field or affected by it and develop perspectives for the future through dialog.
Alma Spribille, founder and managing director of WeTell GmbH and board member of the German Sustainable Economy Association, provided exciting insights into female-led start-ups and sustainability in her keynote speech "Female founders and money".
Female founders with innovative business ideas and their financing had their say in the practical start-up talk. Also present were: Maike Lambarth from Cyclize GmbH, Ines Würth from enerlace and Sabrina Hellstern and Claudia Sodha from Hellstern Medical.
The Female Accelerator is initiated by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labor and Tourism and is coordinated and implemented by TRACES, the transfer center of the University of Stuttgart.
Our cooperation partners:
Funded as part of the state campaign:
Materials to download
Kontakt
Rubina Zern-Breuer
Dr.Head of Transfer Center
[Photo: Universität Stuttgart]
Marcel Fortwingel
Communication Expert & Start-up Coach
Hanna Dewes
Communication & Public Relations