Category Archives: Events

Events, innovation

Innovation Prize 2025 / 2026

Recently, I was honored and excited to be invited to the ZENIT “Innovationspreis 2025 / 2026” awards ceremony at ZENIT in Mülheim, NRW. It was an interesting opportunity to check out what else is going on when it comes to innovation outside that of startups in our state.

And the winners were…

1. Studio 47 Stadtfernsehen Duisburg GmbH & Co KG, for their product(s) BotCast & ClipSense for AI supported media production.

2. IANUS Simulation GmbH, for their product ECOTWIN (Dortmund et al)

3. Petanux GmbH, for their product Retail AI System (Bonn)

And the event was graced by the presence and introductory speech of the current minister of innovation and a partridge in a pear tree in NRW – Mona Neubaur.

Innovationspreis 2025 / 2026

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Events, pitching

Rheinland Pitch Winter Finals 2025

That guy again…

It was that time of year again, time for the Rheinland Pitch Winter Finals!

It’s a wrap! And the winners were…

Defence Tech: Auxsys

Female Founders: Youro

Enterprise SaaS: Neo Predicts

The Rheinland Pitch was founded in 2013 by Lorens Gräf, Matthias Gräf, and me – and since grew to become Germany’s largest startup pitching event. It is open to all startups (for free) and a public audience on a regular basis ever since.

Check out https://rheinlandpitch.de for more photos and the next events.

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Education, Events, mentoring, startup

Mentoring 3DS @ WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management, Vallendar

Recently I was invited by students at the prestigious (often ranked as #1 for business degree universities in Germany) private university of WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar, Germany to mentor at their 3Day- Startup (sorf of a Startup Weekend clone) event.

And the winner was… Team Care
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I’ve also been working with WHU in Düsseldorf for some years now, mentoring at their accelerator program, but I had not been to WHU Vallendar since I was invited to Idealab in 2013, so it was nice to be back again.

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