Towards Digitalization in Academic Start-ups: An Attempt to classify Start-up Projects of the Gruendungsgarage

Founded in 2013 as a playground for implementation-oriented start-up ideas, the Gruendungsgarage is now an established academic start-up accelerator and an integral part of the regional start-up scene. Starting with a brief introduction to the program of the Gruendungsgarage as a best practice example with five years of experience in academic entrepreneurial education, a model with a practical-oriented focus for classifying the degree of digitalization in start-up projects is presented. Successful start-ups and promising start-up projects from the Gruendungsgarage are classified according to their degree of digitalization and illustrated by examples. Finally, implications for the practice in engineering education on entrepreneurship are derived and suggestions for future research are identified.