Prof. Günter Faltin

UNIVERSITY BACKGROUND

Born in 1944, studied economics in St. Gallen (Switzerland) and Tübingen from 1964 to 1968. In 1972, he received his doctorate from the University of Constance.

In 1977, he was appointed professor at the Free University of Berlin, where he established the Entrepreneurship Department. He was appointed to several years of DAAD visiting professorships in Asia, held academic lecture series and workshops in more than 20 countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, India, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan.

Since 2013, he has taught as a guest professor at Chiang Mai University.

PROJECT WORKSHOP, TEEKAMPAGNE

In 1985 he initiated the company Projektwerkstatt GmbH with the idea of the "tea campaign". This company has been the largest importer of Darjeeling tea in the world since 1995, according to the Tea Board of India. Faltin is initiator (since 1992) and sponsor of the reforestation project S.E.R.V.E, which is organized locally by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) for Darjeeling/India.

LABORATORY FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP

In 1999, he founded the Laboratory for Entrepreneurship at Freie Universität Berlin, which was adapted by the Innovation Campus Wolfsburg in 2000. He was an expert in the project Entrepreneurship in Education and Training in Russia, Ukraine of the European Training Foundation (an institution of the EU) from 2000 to 2003. He is a business angel and coach of various start-ups, including ebuero AG (since 2001).

FOUNDATION, GERMAN FOUNDER PRIZE

In 2001, he established the Entrepreneurship Foundation, which organizes the annual Entrepreneurship Summit. In 2009, he accepted the "German Founders Award" for the Tea Campaign.

PIONEER OF THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP IDEA

In 2010, the German President awarded him the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany as a pioneer of the entrepreneurship idea in Germany. 
Tbilisi State University awarded him an honorary doctorate on the occasion of its 100th anniversary.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP TEACHING

Central to Faltin's teaching is the idea that entrepreneurship is now universally accessible. In contrast to business administration, entrepreneurship is a creative act. In the knowledge society, a well thought-out concept of ideas (entrepreneurial design) is more decisive for the success of a business start-up than the availability of large amounts of capital. Moreover, a start-up could be based on completed components. By the world-wide standardization of qualities and achievements in the form of components the Entrepreneur could play even in the concert of large enterprises. It is often sufficient to combine already existing components in a new way.