The award places Fischer-Kreer among a select group of university researchers who, according to the organizers, have made important contributions to the transfer of innovations into business alongside their core duties in research and teaching. The initiative describes the honorees as outstanding researchers at their respective universities who represent the highest standards of research excellence in their fields. Collectively, the professors recognized by UNIPRENEURS have supported around 600 startups as mentors, advisory board members, or investors, and 90 percent of them have founded companies themselves. These figures underline the initiative’s central premise: that the most effective champions of university entrepreneurship are academics who combine scholarly credibility with direct, practical experience of the startup world.

For Fischer-Kreer, the recognition carries significance beyond personal achievement. “I am absolutely delighted about the UNIPRENEURS award. This will bring greater attention to the topics of spin-offs and entrepreneurship at our university, as well as to our commitment to promoting them. The award is a great honor,” she said following the ceremony. Her remarks point to a broader argument that she and the initiative share: that knowledge transfer deserves the same institutional weight as the two traditional pillars of academic life. “Transfer is another key task of a university, alongside research and teaching,” she emphasized, adding that she looks forward to further strengthening the entrepreneurial culture at the University of Bonn in the coming years together with her team and colleagues working in the field of transfer.

Fischer-Kreer’s path to the professorship reflects an unusual combination of academic training and industry experience. She studied industrial engineering before earning her doctorate at RWTH Aachen University, one of Germany’s leading technical institutions. She then spent two years in the strategy department of LANXESS, a specialty chemicals company headquartered in Cologne, gaining firsthand exposure to corporate strategy and innovation management. Rather than remaining in industry, she returned to the university environment with what the University of Bonn describes as great enthusiasm, determined to develop innovative and practical teaching formats that would bring entrepreneurial thinking to a much wider student audience than traditional business education typically reaches.

At the University of Bonn, Fischer-Kreer holds the professorship for Entrepreneurial Behaviour, a position focused on understanding and cultivating the psychological and behavioral foundations of entrepreneurship. A central aim of her teaching is to establish entrepreneurship education across faculties, extending it beyond business and economics students to the natural sciences, agriculture, medicine, and other disciplines where research-based spin-offs often originate. Her stated key goal is to empower students to believe in themselves and their abilities, and to view entrepreneurial thinking as a key future skill, whether they ultimately pursue self-employment or drive change within existing organizations. This framing treats entrepreneurship not merely as a career path but as a transferable mindset applicable across the modern economy.

Her pedagogical approach is notably experimental. Among the interdisciplinary formats she has introduced is the use of improvisational theatre in the lecture hall, a technique designed to build the spontaneity, communication skills, and tolerance for uncertainty that entrepreneurs need in practice. Such methods reflect a growing international consensus in entrepreneurship education that entrepreneurial competencies are best developed through experiential learning rather than purely theoretical instruction. By embedding these formats in a full university setting, Fischer-Kreer is working to normalize entrepreneurial learning as part of the standard academic experience at Bonn rather than an optional add-on for a small cohort of already-motivated students.

Her research agenda is similarly distinctive in its choice of settings. Fischer-Kreer explores entrepreneurship in unique and understudied environments, ranging from a sustainable municipality in southern India to the Vatican in Rome and the Archdiocese of Cologne, as well as entrepreneurial dynamics in the Global South. These contexts allow her to examine how entrepreneurial behavior emerges outside the familiar ecosystem of venture capital, incubators, and technology clusters that dominates much of the mainstream literature. Studying entrepreneurship in religious institutions and developing-region municipalities can reveal how motivation, community structures, and resource constraints shape the way individuals identify opportunities and mobilize support for new ventures, insights that feed directly back into her teaching.

Her commitment to fostering an entrepreneurial spirit has also been recognized at the industry level. In 2024, DEUTZ AG in Cologne honored her with the Nicolaus August Otto Award for her dedication to fostering entrepreneurship among business startups in the agriculture and food industries. This focus connects naturally with her institutional affiliations at the University of Bonn, where she is a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Sustainable Futures” and the Cluster of Excellence “PhenoRob,” a research cluster dedicated to digitalization and robotics in crop production. The intersection of agricultural technology, sustainability, and entrepreneurship represents one of the most promising areas for research-based spin-offs, and her work positions the university to support founders in precisely this space.

Beyond teaching and research, Fischer-Kreer plays an active institutional role in the local startup ecosystem. As a board member of the Universitätsgesellschaft Bonn, the university’s support society, she supports and develops the regional startup landscape and promotes the transfer of knowledge and practical expertise between academia and business. She is also the founder of the UGB Transfer Award, which recognizes transfer achievements at the university. Her practical work extends into unusual formats, including the development of gaming and children’s book formats designed to promote an entrepreneurial mindset from an early age. She additionally acts as a VIP+ mentor for Sweethoven Biotech, a project that has developed a healthy sugar alternative based on fundamental research, demonstrating her hands-on involvement in guiding early-stage science-based ventures toward commercialization.

The UNIPRENEURS initiative itself was created by Matthias Hilpert and Martin Schilling with the explicit task of fostering spin-offs at German universities. The Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, a foundation dedicated to science and higher education, is responsible for organizing and implementing the joint initiatives, while the German Startups Association, Bitkom, and AddedVal.io support the program as partners. The award is presented every three years and is described as Germany’s highest honor for outstanding commitment to promoting entrepreneurship at universities. The Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy have jointly assumed the patronage of the initiative, a signal of the strategic importance that German policy attaches to translating academic research into commercial innovation.

Political leaders at the ceremony framed the award in terms of Germany’s broader economic future. “With the UNIPRENEURS initiative, entrepreneurial activity at German universities is being fostered by raising the profile of professors who play a key role,” said Dorothee Bär, Federal Minister of Research, Technology, and Space. “The award recipients make a significant contribution to creating a culture of entrepreneurship at universities and are thus also important drivers of Germany’s capacity for innovation and long-term competitiveness.” Katharina Reiche, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, echoed that assessment: “UNIPRENEURS represents the strong link between academic excellence and entrepreneurial courage at our universities. The professors honored make an important contribution to Germany’s competitiveness as an innovation hub.” For the University of Bonn, the recognition of Fischer-Kreer affirms a strategy of embedding entrepreneurship across the institution, and for the honoree herself, it provides a platform from which she intends to keep building that culture in the years ahead.

Subject of Research: National award for university entrepreneurship education and startup promotion in Germany

Article Title: UNIPRENEURS honors Denise Fischer-Kreer

Article References: UNIPRENEURS honors Denise Fischer-Kreer. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: UNIPRENEURS, Denise Fischer-Kreer, University of Bonn, entrepreneurship education, academic spin-offs, knowledge transfer, startup ecosystem, Germany, Stifterverband, entrepreneurial behaviour, innovation, higher education