Realignment of the start-up academy
The HSZG's Start-up Academy has a new face in Claudia Döring. In future, the focus will be on company succession and transfer.
Since May 2025, the Startup Academy at Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences has taken on a new look. This change is also accompanied by a reorientation of its program content.
Following an initial orientation phase and the development of the program’s content, the Start-up Academy’s new direction has now been finalized. This is reason enough for Prof. Dr. rer. pol. Sophia Keil, Vice President for Research, Knowledge Transfer, and International Affairs, to once again officially welcome Claudia Döring, the startup advisor at Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences.
With the realignment of the Start-up Academy, we are strengthening founders, promoting company succession and knowledge transfer. I am delighted to welcome Ms. Döring to her new role and look forward to shaping this important path together with such a competent personality.
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Services Offered by the Startup Academy
In addition to advisory services for those interested in starting a business, there will continue to be informational events and workshops on the topics of business startups and entrepreneurship. The primary focus here will continue to be on raising awareness of these topics.
A new addition, however, is the focus on business succession, which can also be understood as a form of startup. In the future, the Startup Academy will collaborate closely with the FamilyBusinessInitiative@HSZG —led by Prof. René Sadowski—on this topic.
The FamilyBusinessInitiative@HSZG addresses the challenges of business succession in our region. The goal is to develop solutions in collaboration with companies and to raise our university’s profile in this field. The project is built on three pillars: practice-oriented research, knowledge and skills development, and an annual conference for Saxon family businesses.
Saxony is the land of entrepreneurs. In the coming years, the successful organization of over 10,000 successions will determine the future of our economy and society. As a place for the next generation, the HSZG assumes responsibility - and brings together partners from science, business and society to rethink leadership and succession in family businesses.
”What is also new is that we will focus even more strongly than before on the transfer of our research projects and further intensify and expand cooperation with the research institutes that are settling here, such as the German Center for Astrophysics (DZA) in Görlitz, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Zittau and the Fraunhofer Institute in Zittau, in order to strengthen our region and create new jobs.
The HSZG's own research projects will also become a greater focus of the start-up academy in order to sustainably secure the research results acquired and make them accessible to a large number of people.
I am very grateful that I can help shape the Start-up Academy with my own ideas and content. Because I want to provide impetus that helps to develop companies and find new perspectives. And that's why it's so exciting to discover and support the multitude of ideas and opportunities and thus contribute to the development of our region.
”Focusing on Strengths Rather Than Assessing Competencies
We are taking another new approach: competencies are important in many life situations and fields of study. The competencies necessary for practicing a profession will continue to be taught and assessed in the respective academic disciplines, as before. At the same time, the program is now being supplemented by the VIA Character Strengths. This replaces the previous competency assessment using KODE®.
By utilizing the VIA Character Strengths, Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences supports students, entrepreneurs, and founders in achieving international success.
The VIA character strengths are positive traits that are present in every person to varying degrees and significantly shape the soft skills of every person. They are based on positive psychology and can be used in a variety of ways - by coaches & consultants, managers, teachers and families, among others.
The VIA Character Strengths combine research and practice and are an international system that is constantly being further developed and researched. What is special about this system is that it is universal, multidimensional and international thanks to in-depth literature research and worldwide practical research - and even applies to marginalized cultural groups such as the Masai or the Inuit.
At the same time, the VIA character strengths also do justice to every individual: after all, there are 75 trillion times more combinations of strengths than there are people in the world.
Further information: Via Institute on Character
4th upper floor