Young entrepreneurs meet supervisory board member and business experts
Since the 2001/2002 school year, Gymnasium Ohmoor in Hamburg-Niendorf has been one of more than 70 schools in Germany, Austria, Italy, the UK, Albania and Switzerland that take part in the project every year. Most recently, in 2016, a team from Gymnasium Ohmoor beat off competition from Hamburg and was allowed to pitch its idea "GardenShip," an intermediary platform for garden sharing, at the German finals.
Sabine Eckhardt, a member of the supervisory boards of UniCredit Bank AG, CECONOMY AG and Edel SE & Co. KGaA, is an advisory board member of business@school. At the event in Hamburg, she entered into dialog with business@school participants. She expressed her gratitude for the educational initiative: "Germany does not have a distinctive entrepreneurial culture. Starting up and being self-employed is not necessarily the first choice and is associated with risk. But what do you really have to lose? There is so much to gain! So it's all the more important that initiatives like business@school encourage young people to try something out and take this step for themselves."
Afterwards, Sabine Eckhardt, together with Dr. Babette Claas, head of the education initiative, the project-leading teacher Julian Danielczik and the department head for the 11th and 12th grades, Mathias Mende, presented a donation check for 500 euros for digital projects at the school. Business expert Karin Scheibner from Lufthansa Technik AG and business expert Frank Kulick from Commerzbank AG are involved in business@school as coaches and, in addition to exchanging ideas in the discussion group, use the event to be available to their student teams for final questions before the upcoming presentations.
Sven von der Heyde, former teacher at Gymnasium Ohmoor, also accepted the invitation to the school and enjoyed the exchange with the student teams: "It feels good to be here again!" For almost ten years, Sven von der Heyde conducted business@school at Gymnasium Ohmoor. In the summer of 2022, he followed his entrepreneurial spirit and, as co-founder, launched an online coaching platform for young people who want to shape their future after school with more clarity and ease. In the meantime, even former business@school students are among his collaborators.