The HPI E-School hosted this year's bootcamp together with Vali, the entrepreneurship hub at ESMT Berlin. This year's topic was dedicated to innovating cybersecurity together with our corporate partner SAP. It was targeted specifically at HPI and ESMT students & alumni to bring together diverse teams from tech and business.
During the three-day event, over 30 participants worked intensely on innovative startup ideas within the domain of cybersecurity. In 50 hours consisting of team building, ideating, business modeling, prototyping, iterating and pitching, the teams went through the ups and downs that come along with bringing forth a new startup idea. The participants built 6 interdisciplinary teams working their way through the weekend. Among the participants coming from more than 10 different nations all kind of skills were represented ranging from business, IT, design and cybersecurity.
The insights and feedback from industry-experts made this event a unique experience for all participants. Dr. Felix Schuster, founder of Edgeless Systems and Peter Minev, entrepreneur & CTO at Clark, shared their founding experience in the tech sector. Wenzel Pünter, Pejman Najafi and Lola Attenberger, all three cybersecurity researchers, accompanied the teams with their in-depth knowledge in the area of cybersecurity. The teams also benefited from excellent coaching and valuable inputs coming from coaches of the HPI School of Design Thinking - thank you to Lina Ewert, Ferdinand Wagner, Franka Blumrich and Sherif Osman for your support! Additionally, the teams were working on real-world challenges by our corporate partner SAP and were able to get first-hand insights into the cybersecurity challenges at SAP with the help of SAP cybersecurity expert Philip Engelmartin. On the last day, the participants got a deep dive into pitching by the infamous Pitch Doctor Christoph Sollich.
At the end of the weekend the expert jury consisting of Philip Engelmartin, Peter Minev, Karina Buschsieweke and Christian Bogatu assessed the teams critically and chose the best idea and the best pitch winner. After a lively discussion, the jury announced team Asfelia as the winner of the best idea award. Team Incident Fighters with their solution 911 Fast Response convinced the jury with their insightful and entertaining pitch and was awarded the best pitch prize.
We are totally thrilled to see which teams will pursue their idea further. Each project has the potential to solve existing challenges within the industry!
