Interview with BTU alumnus Sascha Lademann (Business Administration)

Sascha Lademann completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Business Administration at BTU and then worked in research and innovation funding, as a research assistant at the Chair of Finance at TU Dresden and as an officer at the Lusatia Commissioner in the Brandenburg State Chancellery. He now heads up the exciting Startup Lab Schwedt project. In this interview, we talk to him about challenges and interesting projects.

Hello Mr Lademann, how did you come to study Business Administration at BTU and what was your experience here?
I initially decided to study "Financial Management" close to home at the former Eberswalde University of Applied Sciences. However, as early as the second semester, I realised that the practical relevance of a degree course was less important to me than an in-depth examination of theory and research methods. So I looked at various universities and ultimately opted for the BTU's Business Administration programme, which was still very new at the time, as this was the best way for me to continue my political activities and the part-time job I had just started. In the first semesters in Cottbus, everything was great and you could see that the director of studies was continuously working on the further development of the study programme and even the range of courses was growing. And then, unfortunately, the merger process took things in the opposite direction and studying became a bit more unpredictable, as researchers and lecturers came and went. But somehow that was also quite exciting. In the end, however, I was very satisfied and the size of the university meant that contact with the researchers was always very good. This was ultimately also the key to the fact that I not only spoke to my supervisor at the time, Gunther Markwardt, about the thesis, but also suggested that I take part in a call for funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with my Master's thesis topic and was fortunately selected. However, due to further reorganisation at BTU, I ended up at TU Dresden with the project, which was of course really cool.

What would you recommend students do to balance "all-round knowledge" and "specialised knowledge"?
I think that varies from subject to subject. If you want to get into technology development in the STEM subjects later on, you will need a lot of specialised knowledge and if you find your passion for something during your studies, you're definitely not doing anything wrong. In economics and social sciences, I would say that the trend is moving more towards "all-round knowledge" and interdisciplinarity. Quite simply because the world of work is changing and you really often have to familiarise yourself with new subject areas and issues and the ability to cooperate is also becoming increasingly important. It helps a lot if, as a business graduate, you also have a feel for legal, technological or political issues. I've been in the profession for less than 10 years and have already dealt with municipal finances, regional economics, various industrial sectors, the development of funding processes and political strategies and many digital technologies. The decisive factor has always been that I solve the task at hand very well; no one has ever really asked me about my specialisation during my studies.

To what extent did your studies prepare you for your current role as Head of the Schwedt Startup Lab?
At the beginning, a project like this is nothing more than a budget and an abstract task. That means you really take care of everything. Job descriptions for staff, setting up offices, establishing work processes, translating the budget into concrete measures, building networks, etc., etc. When I think back to my module catalogue during my studies, a lot of the foundations were laid there. These range from project management, controlling, information systems and private law to economics, where it's more about having an overview of where to steer a project. In this respect, the broad, rather than specialised, range of modules on offer in Cottbus suited me very well. In any case, you only build up expertise in certain areas in your working life.

What is the Startup Lab Schwedt and what exactly do you do there? What is your day-to-day work like?
We are part of a federal-state programme for the East German refinery sites and ports. So it's a project at Eberswalde University of Applied Sciences, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics as part of the EXIST programme and co-financed by the state of Brandenburg. The idea is to support the industrial transformation process in Schwedt with innovative approaches from the start-up ecosystems and to bring together great approaches from young teams with established industries. So we are not a start-up centre or start-up incubator, but rather work as a kind of industrial real laboratory with innovation ecosystems and start-ups that have a need for a location like Schwedt, e.g. are looking for application scenarios for their technology, or need an industrial environment outside the metropolitan regions in order to access certain services, resources or approval conditions. As a rule, these are start-ups, e.g. from the greentech sector, who are now ready to scale up their technology from the lab and want to carry out a demonstration project in an industrial area, for example. A large part of the work is therefore taking on the many start-up enquiries and initiating projects. The other big part of the work is to turn them into usable results for the location. These can be very operational things, e.g. longer-term collaborations between industry and start-ups or even the establishment of a new business model at the location, but also strategic issues, e.g. with regard to the technology paths required for change. In particular, this involves a lot of knowledge management.

What are the challenges of establishing a start-up culture in north-east Brandenburg?
Where do you start and where do you stop? In my view, it will hardly be possible to establish an independent start-up culture in the short term. On the one hand, the start-up potential is very limited due to the population density, population structure and existing R&D activity in the region. On the other hand, the structural weaknesses can hardly be ignored. Networks need to be established, access to venture capital facilitated, suitable innovation topics identified and further developed, infrastructures and structures created from which communities or even a networked ecosystem can emerge. With the university in Eberswalde, the list of university locations is already complete. Ultimately, it must become an active structural policy that focuses on innovation as a driver for a new dynamic in the region. As the Schwedt Startup Lab project, we are certainly the first anecdotal evidence that something like this can also be initiated in north-east Brandenburg, but it can only become a real culture if the right conditions are created, as listed above. By analogy with Lusatia, it will hardly be possible to achieve this from within the region alone.

What are some exciting projects and events at Startup Labor Schwedt that you can tell us about?
We are currently running our first Startup Challenge on the topic of "Increasing energy and resource efficiency". The idea behind it is that we want to look to the future with startup technologies and use pilot projects to find out how the industrial transformation in Schwedt can be organised in concrete terms. In doing so, we are acting as a kind of public client in the context of "innovative procurement". This means that the teams receive an R&D contract from us and then work specifically on utilising the technology that is still under development. We also cooperate with regional industry, which supports us here as an application scenario, infrastructure provider and in mentoring the teams. The programme runs in two phases: For the concept phase, our jury has selected 10 teams from almost 40 offers from teams from all over Germany and beyond, who are now designing a possible pilot project for the location. The 5 best approaches will then be selected to realise their pilot project in Schwedt. The contract value for the concept phase is around €25,000, and up to €300,000 for the implementation phase. We are really excited about the results and very proud that so many teams, many of them very renowned, have applied for our challenge and that we have been able to find a wide range of technologies. The approaches range from concrete recycling and plasma catalyses for the production of synthesis gas from waste materials to artificial intelligence and virtual balancing areas for energy consumption.

What do you miss most from your periods of study at BTU?
I probably miss the beginning of a semester the most. Checking course offerings, making a timetable, reading module descriptions and checking Moodle to see if any documents have already been uploaded. Although you already knew what you had to and wanted to do in the Bachelor's and Master's programmes, there were always some nice surprises in seminars and lectures. Especially shortly after the merger, there were a lot of changes of lecturers, so I really hadn't expected some of the courses on offer. For me, it was always the case that I started with total ambition: I printed out documents, created a folder, got a textbook and immersed myself in the subject. In the first week or two, I usually went to most of the courses, until my discipline waned and I spent far too much time with my part-time job, party commitments and other interests and usually worked through the modules completely on my own. I could have made it easier for myself and wouldn't have been so surprised by one or two exams.