Digital Experts United
About Christian Fenner, Co-Founder of the Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition
Christian Fenner is Co-Founder of the Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition and has led all Competitions together with his team from digitaleheimat GmbH since 2013 until the End of 2022.
In this role, Christian has created the concept that more than 100.000 users used to take the entrepreneurship training Prof.Faltin created and to get millions of users worldwide from more than 300 countries to read, vote and comment on the tens of thousands of idea´s that were created on the entrepreneurship-campus.org platform.
„Professor Faltin was looking for a way to teach entrepreneurship to the masses with an easy and lean method to allow as many people as possible to learn how to solve problems using a digital platform. So we sat together for many nights and brainstormed about how we could reach a big audience without big marketing budgets. We came up with the "idea competition" idea, which was very unusual, when we started.” Christian recalls.
„Back then, ideas were still considered to being the secret of a founder, that he would never publish, because common sense was that others were looking to steal your idea. We changed this common mindset with our competition by providing both a place to learn entrepreneurship, work on your idea on the one side and meet other like minded founders from all over the world at the same stage and help each other.”
To initiate a feedback dialog between users for their ideas, we created gamification aspects:
1. Participants could publish their ideas to participate in the competition and get votes.
2. Before that participants could comment on other ideas to help the other participants with feedback to their ideas.
„Günter Faltin and I also asked ourselves: What are the most important behaviours of a successful Entrepreneur and how can we enable our participants through technology to learn and train these skills? Besides creating an idea and promoting it well so it gets traction, successful entrepreneurs constantly train themselves by helping others with their ideas. So we developed a gamification aspect: to win a competition, you would need to help others by commenting on their ideas, provide additional educational content to the competition and by completing all of Prof-Faltins courses.”
Christian and his team therefore wrote an algorithm to participants behaviour and used a "factor score" in the form of a bar to display this on all participants profiles. „Through this, interaction between participants went through the roof” he recalls. „We literally went from hundred of comments on idea pages one year to hundrets of thousands of comments in the next - it was fascinating to see how we were able to change participant behavior so drastically just by using technology!”
Christian is finishing his 13th year of voluntary work for the Stiftung Entrepreneurship by the end of 2022.
„It was an honour and a great pleasure to work with Prof.Günter Faltin! His entrepreneurship books and teachings have changed the lifes of many people and I am glad, that I could be part of this by providing ideas, time and technology. Now it´s time to move on to other projects. I wish Prof. Faltin and his team all the best!”
About Christian Fenner
Christian lives in Berlin together with his wife and four children. After studying film in New York, he worked in film and PR in Hamburg. When the internet went mainstream, he founded a digital agency, which he sold in 2005 to found an online plattform for communities with Prof. Faltin as his business angel. After selling this business in 2008 he started to work as an online marketing consultant mainly for startups like Get Your Guide AG, ebuero AG or projects with Oliver Samwer.
In 2010 Günter Faltin and he started the first project together for the Stiftung called "Kopf schlägt Kapital" Wettbewerb - a German version of the www.entrepreneurship-campus-org plattform, together with Google, 3M and Volkswagen.
In 2011 he founded digitaleheimat GmbH, a digital agency based in Berlin Kreuzberg.
Besides his work, Christian is a business angel for startups and has co-created online educational trainings and masterclasses for online marketing and MVP (Minimum viable product) and product creation.
With his 13 year long voluntary work for the Stiftung Entrepreneurship, he wants to help people worldwide to become founders by doing that to provide intelligent solutions to the problem of our world.
More Info on Christian: www.christianfenner.de
