Enabling Ideas for the Future: Bridging Creative Projects, Innovation and the Arts

Enabling Ideas For The Future. Bridging Creative Projects, Innovation, And The Arts doi: 10.52987/edc.2025.005 Felix Liedel, Monika Waschik, Christian Lengl, Ulrike Machalett-Gehring Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt Münzstraße 12, 97070 Würzburg, Germany Felix.liedel@thws.de ABSTRACT Based on the analysis of current entrepreneurship support in Germany, a team at the Campus for Applied Reasearch at the Technical University of Applied Sciences WürzburgSchweinfurt has developed a new approach. The “Bridging Studies: Future Ideas and Project Implementation” started successfully in the winter semester of 2024 and is unique in this form in Germany. The Bridging Studies enable regular enrolment at the university and are particularly suitable for bridging qualification and life stages, for example between a Bachelor's and Master's degree or after completing a Master's degree. The Bridging Studies focus on the real implementation of an individual passion project. Each student brings his or her own idea to the program, which is supported for one or two semesters. In this way, we want to reach projects that already have start-up ambitions as well as those that do not yet identify themselves as start-up projects but have the potential to do so. In particular, we also address students of the humanities and social sciences, as well as artistic projects that have so far remained largely unseen in entrepreneurship support. In courses on topics such as personal development, project management, business modeling, communication and science management, students work on their own ideas. On the one hand, this article aims to enrich the overarching discussion for a target-oriented entrepreneurship qualification with a new approach and, at the same time, raise the question of the transferability of the model to other forms of study, teaching and examination.