Entrepreneurship and Global Challenges
In January 2017 SDU's section of Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation had the great pleasure of co-organizing the 7th International Leuphana Conference on Entrepreneurship in Luneburg, Germany.
The conference is a major annual event in the field of entrepreneurship research and this year it brought together more than 300 researchers and practitioners from all over the world, including Prof. h.c. Dr. Per Davidsson from Queensland University of Technology (Australia), Prof. Jay Mitra from the Essex Business School (UK), Prof. Dr. Marco van Gelderen from the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), and Florian Hoffmann, the founder of the Do School Innovation Lab in Hamburg (Germany) all of whom enriched the conference with their inspiring keynote speeches.
The guiding theme of the conference this time was "Entrepreneurship and Global Challenges". Opinions and contributions from conference participants converged on the fact that modern entrepreneurs face a number of “wicked problems” within globalized economic structures and that tackling these problems requires even stronger interdisciplinary efforts in both research and practice than previously.
This realization perfectly matched the conclusions arrived at by the SDU's section of Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation with its important contribution to the LCE event: The organization of an interdisciplinary workshop that addressed how future entrepreneurship training in persuasive, charismatic pitching and presentation skills can benefit from collaborations with experts in phonetics and digital speech-signal processing. As a result, a vivid and fruitful discussion was stimulated about how acoustic analyses of business speeches and pitches can help us go beyond traditional (subjective) training based on rhetorical terms and instructions and provide researchers as well as entrepreneurs with a more objective, detailed, and technologically applicable understanding of what persuasive charismatic speech actually means for different audience groups, cultures, and business areas. The SDU has a leading position at this intersection of innovation management, entrepreneurship and acoustically based speech technology, and the conference contributed to strengthening this profile further at an international level.
For further information please contact Oliver Niebuhr, olni@sdu.dk or phone +45-6550 7649 or Silke Tegtmeier, tegtmeier@mci.sdu.dk or phone 6550 9201
