Post by Campus Founders

At Campus Founders GRAVITY, we launched "𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽𝘀 𝗮𝘀 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀", a joint whitepaper by Campus Founders, NXTGN, D11Z. Ventures, and Festo ✍ The goal: give SMEs and Mittelstand companies a real, practical answer to a question that keeps coming up. How do you actually work with startups in a way that produces results? Annalena Ruoff from NXTGN walked the room through the paper. Adrian Thoma (NXTGN), Tom Villinger(D11Z.), Alfons Riek (DSL) (Festo), and Oliver Hanisch (Campus Founders) opened the evening 🙌 Seven founders also shared their experience: Richard Stefani (Adric), Laurent Kettler (Blockbrain.ai), Julian Enz (Maddox AI), Maximilian Hahnenkamp (Scavenger AI), Philipp Heideker (Sleak AI), Lisa Raab(Spotium), and Jakub Zavrel (Zeta Alpha). Jonas B. Jungbauer from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Economics, Labour and Tourism also joined and presented the ministry's Innovationsgutscheine program, a useful resource for SMEs looking to fund exactly this kind of innovation work. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘄: Established companies are under pressure, from technology shifts, changing customer needs, and geopolitical uncertainty. They need to optimize existing business and explore new opportunities at the same time. The whitepaper presents Corporate Venturing as the framework to close that gap, covering Venture Building, Corporate Venture Capital, and Venture Partnering. For most Mittelstand companies, Venture Partnering is the most practical entry point: lower risk, faster pilots, scalable results. The paper goes deep on Venture Clienting, Co-Creation, and Reverse Clienting, backed by 14 real collaboration projects with documented outcomes. This framework enables SMEs and corporates to participate in many different topics and innovations at once, if they learn to "make the market work for them" as Annalena put it. 𝟯𝟴 𝗽𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀. 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀. 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗳. 👏 Link to the white paper in the comments.