Current Projects

As part of the project, a digital, fully virtual seminar entitled “Social Innovation Thinkathon” is being developed and carried out in the “Connecting Science, Responsibility and Society” module of the complementary studies for students in the third master’s semester. Analogous to the hackathon format, the Thinkathon format aims at the collaborative, digital and interdisciplinary development of approaches to solving social problems.

The "Green Fashion Challenge-App" project by Professor Dr. Jacob Hörisch is one of the winners of the ideas competition "Fashion Culture, Textiles and Sustainability" of the German Council for Sustainable Development (RNE). The junior professor of sustainability economics and management at Leuphana University of Lüneburg entered the competition with the idea of using an app for smartphones to make textile consumption more sustainable.

The research project "Crowdfunding of Environmental Innovations" is funded by the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (German Federal Environmental Foundation) and is led by Prof. Jacob Hörisch in collaboration with Isabell Tenner. It addresses the question of how start-ups and SMEs can finance environmental innovations through crowdfunding and target potential investors.

Student Training for Entrepreneurial Promotion (STEP) is an entrepreneurship training program that aims to strengthen the skills of young people in developing countries so that they can successfully face the difficult conditions in local labor markets. The focus is on teaching entrepreneurial skills that allow young people to start an alternative career as an entrepreneur.

Female entrepreneurs are one of the fastest growing populations in the world (Brush et al., 2006). Yet women own and run significantly fewer businesses compared to men. Moreover, female-owned businesses continue to be disadvantaged in terms of profit, business growth, and thus business success and survival. The goal of this research project on "Gender and Entrepreneurship" is to better understand gender differences in entrepreneurship, their causes and behavioral as well as societal consequences.

Individuals vary in their preference for different roles in their entrepreneurial activities (Fauchert & Gruber, 2011). Entrepreneurial activities, such as starting a firm, are inherently social activities and firms are inherently social constructs (Whetten & Mackey, 2002). Therefore, it is helpful to view entrepreneurship and founder identity from the perspective of social identity theory (Tajfel, 1972; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). The goal of the research project on "Social Identity and Entrepreneurship" is to better understand the development of entrepreneurial social identity and the different types of social entrepreneurial identity. Furthermore, we try to relate the different types of social entrepreneurial identity to different entrepreneurial and sustainability-related variables as well as predictors (e.g. gender).

Sustainability Entrepreneurship is concerned with the conservation of nature, society and life support systems as well as new business ideas to develop future products and services. To develop a general theory of sustainability entrepreneurship and to identify the driving factors for sustainable entrepreneurship, the development of different business models over time and under the leadership of different entrepreneurs is considered.