HSG Focus on start-ups

15 February 2019. "Research has shown: entrepreneurs are among the happiest people in the world", says entrepreneurship professor Dietmar Grichnik. To ease you into this latest edition of HSG Focus on the topic of start-ups, we asked him a few questions about entrepreneurship. How do I finance my business idea? What are the most frequent causes of failure for young companies? What proportion of companies are founded by women?

Almost all of us have dreamt about being our own boss at one time or another. It’s a dream that could come true, as proven by the examples of PassOn, DataCareer and Namics – three HSG spin-offs that we take a look at in this current edition. However, no start-up is going to be successful without a good business idea for which there is also a sufficiently large market. In developing this, the "Pitch Doctor", a venture capitalist, hybrid intelligence, participation in the St.Gallen START Summit, and perhaps even a touch of madness can help – all topics we cover in our dossier of perspectives on selected start-ups.

In the "Campus" section of the new HSG Focus, we welcome Professor Gudrun Sander as a columnist for 2019. In her first article, she examines the usefulness of benchmarking, while this edition’s "Research" section focuses on "Money in politics" and service robots in hospitals.