The REACH-EUREGIO Start-Up Center at the WWU organizes an annual ideas competition to promote a start-up-friendly climate at the FH Münster and the WWU. Members of both universities can apply with projects that strengthen the start-up ecosystem and the start-up climate in Münster. These can be, for example, concepts for teaching and networking events, project-related collaborations within the faculties or events by students for students. An independent jury will select the winning projects, which will receive a total of €100,000 in funding.

This year's winning projects "Blockchain Academy" and "Informatics Club Münster" are particularly interesting for information systems students and scholars.

At the Blockchain Academy, speakers from the German Web3 scene will introduce participants to the basics of blockchain technology and exciting use cases in ten block events. The goal is to enable students to understand blockchain and Web3 functionalities, to recognize application potentials and thus to learn the ability to develop solutions for the biggest problems of our time with the help of this unique new technology.

The Informatics Club Münster wants to support computer science students to network and educate each other. The central project of the Informatics Club Münster will be the "DevTandem". This is a bi-annual program in which participants form teams and work together on a project over the course of the semester. The Informatics Club Münster also offers an accompanying program, which is supervised by mentors and in which the exchange of knowledge between the different teams takes place. The developed projects are open source and will be presented to the public at the end of the DevTandem and published as blog entries. The first DevTandem project is scheduled to start in the winter semester of 2023/24.

More information about the Reach for Ideas competition and all winning projects can be found here.