Start-ups: The best young talents in Germany

At 7 p.m. this year’s award ceremony for the German Founder’s Prize for schoolchildren (DGPS), one of the largest business simulation games in Europe, begins, proclaimed by the partners stern, savings banks, ZDF and Porsche AG.

The students present their ideas in short videos and the stories behind them are as surprising and varied as the teams themselves: Some came up with their start-up idea while writing an exam about Schiller’s “Die Räuber”; the others at the sight of plastic foils in asparagus fields; still others were inspired by the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s fight against straight lines.

But no matter who is at the top of the podium at the end of the evening – everyone who has made it this far has already won. In four months of intensive work, they succeeded in developing a fictitious business model from their visions, including a financing, sales and marketing plan, which a critical jury considered worthy of an award. As a team, you have – which is perhaps an even more important experience – experienced all the ups and downs that one can experience in such a project: arguments and reconciliation, despair and euphoria. A conclusion of many participants is that a good team spirit is at least as important for success as a good idea. “We distributed the tasks fairly so that everyone has roughly the same workload,” says Nada Ihlo from the “Exam’s Easy” team. When meetings begin with debates about unfinished business, there is little room for creativity.

The top ten mastered this – and many other challenges – brilliantly. They can celebrate tonight.