Just in time for the Oktoberfest, Invest in Bavaria invited 21 international start-up multipliers from all over the world to Munich. Incubators, accelerators, VCs and startup associations from over 10 countries plus the alumnis from the Israeli / American ZELL Entrepreneurship Program joined us for our "Bits & Pretzels Oktoberfest Innovation Tour".
We just want to give a short overview of our highlights and thank everyone for letting us bust into their workplaces and taking time for us - especially since we were actually wearing Dirndl & Lederhosen and might have enjoyed one or two beers at the Oktoberfest at some point.
The 3 day Innovation Tour started out with a kick-off breakfast, that included a more or less elegant lecture on how to eat the traditional Bavarian Weisswürste (white sausages) and all of us trying to fit in a Gondl. After we managed to get all out the Gondl (cable car cabin), we joined the Bits & Pretzels conference, the founder festival of Munich.
Our next day already started with a highlight: We are very grateful to Dr. Helmut Schönenberger (CEO of UnternehmerTUM) and Dr. Carsten Rudolph (CEO of BayStartup) for opening the innovation tour with two very interesting presentations about the Bavarian startup ecosystem. Also a big thank you to the amazing team at Makerspace, especially to Thomas Schuch from the Makerspace team and Alexander Waldmann from the AppliedAI initiative. At Werk1 our thanks go to Florian Mann, Xenia Poppe and Manuel Holzhauer for explaining to us what the most startup friendly place in Munich is (Werk1 if you were wondering) and presenting to us the insurtechHub. A stop at the BMW Start-up Garage event ended our day.
The next day we finally did it: We went through the holy gates of Oktoberfest, most of us dressed up as fancy as it gets with Lederhosen and Dirndl. And make no mistake, that is exactly the outfit we were wearing when Mr. Robert Klarner from DLR incubation center welcomed us at the German Center for Mechatronic and Robotic and the German Aerospace Center. His presentation gave us a good overview on the DLR incubation program for high-tech startups and we saw astronauts - like real ones, floating in space. Nothing to do with startups but there were astronauts! And last but not least the BioM cluster and the Medical Valley Erlangen gave us on idea on what is going on in Bavaria for startups in the field of life sciences. Special thanks to Ms. Enke-Stolle and Mr. Reimer.
The big finale of our time together was our beer bench networking event, where we showed our guests that Bavarian hospitality is a real thing. At this point we want to thank our amazing Bavarian startup and innovation ecosystem for joining us at Mindspace. Sorry, that we made you wear hearts and pretzels as a matchmaking tool. But hey, it worked.
Last but not least, we really want to thank the startup multipliers who joined us from all over the world. Thank you for taking the time and getting to know us. We hope to see you all very soon again in Munich!
