The EUNICE Contamination Lab summer school in Catania, Sicily, enabled successful team building.

The Summer School of the EUNICE Contamination Lab from July 10–14, 2023, on the slopes of Etna was the final phase of the pilot EUNICE Contamination Lab project that started in March 2023. Approximately 50 students and PhD candidates from France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Finland, and Germany developed their startup ideas in teams and acquired skills on how to found a startup. During the Friday workshops, students learned about the phases of the foundation of an enterprise, i.e., idea generation, market analysis, SWOT analysis, and financials.

Three participants of the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Tatiana Kholiavko, Matthias Nattke, and Burhan Ahmad, got the chance to meet in person their team peers at the Summer School in Catania and to become acquainted with some important knowledge on teamwork in entrepreneurship. Besides them, three staff members, Prof. Magdalena Mißler-Behr, Cheng-Wen Jaw, and Viktor Zakar, participated at this ECLab Summer School in Catania.

During the summer school in Catania, the Lego series were used for the purpose of team building. Other topics discussed were "ecoism" or sustaining the system, "collaborative decision making" and "sustainability challenges in the corporate and start-up worlds.".

The Start-up Center of the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg and the Chair of general business administration, especially planning, innovation, and foundation, cooperated with the EUNICE-Office at the BTU in regards to organization and content. One of the key tasks of this BTU chair at Faculty 5 was to prepare a workshop dealing with "Financials". The workshop was carried out by Prof. Dr. Magdalena Mißler-Behr, Julia Braun, Daria Morcinczyk-Meier, Viktor Zakar (PhD), Cheng-Wen Jaw, and Kirill Sarachuk. In a testimonial, Saman Amanpour (PhD) presented the challenges during and after the creation of the new startup (https://e-phant.de/ephant-de/), which was supported by the Start-Up Service of the BTU. „The online generation of new start-ups faced many challenges, which were successfully tackled by the students at the ECLab. They demonstrated it in front of the international jury during the pitch session", said the project manager of the Start-Up Center of the BTU, Viktor Zakar.