About the competition

The Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition (CEC) is a part of the Entrepreneurship Campus and was initiated to empower entrepreneurs all around the world to create innovative answers to global and/or community challenges and to engage in a more peaceful and sustainable world. 

You are invited to submit your innovative ideas and projects with a societal impact, which champion and implement one or more of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs and 169 related targets address the most important social, economic, environmental, health and governmental challenges of our time.

Before, during and after the CEC you have the possibility to take two courses to help develop a sustainable business model from your idea. You will gain knowledge that can be helpful to change or upgrade existing projects as well. The Brain versus Capital (BvC) course serves as a basis and can also be completed without prior registration. The additional Sustainable Entrepreneurship Course (SEC) is recommended to be done after the end of the BvC course. Both courses are free of charge.

Note: Taking the BvC and/or SEC course is not mandatory to take part in the Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition. However, it is a helpful tool to get the greatest possible potential out of your ideas and projects.

If you are between 13 and 29 years old, please submit your idea and/or project in the Youth Citizen Entrepreneurship category. If you are 30+ you can submit your idea and/or project to the Adult Citizen Entrepreneurship category. Please make sure that you submit your entry into the right category. If not, your entry cannot be included in the competition. You will have to delete the entry and submit it again.

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About Christian Fenner, Co-Founder of the Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition

Christian Fenner is a Co-Founder of the Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition and has led all Competitions together with his team from digitaleheimat GmbH from 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 and territories to read, vote, and comment on the tens of thousands of ideas 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 be 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 on their ideas.

“Günter Faltin and I also asked ourselves: What are the most important behaviors 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, providing additional educational content to the competition, and by completing all of Prof-Faltin’s courses“

Christian and his team, therefore, wrote an algorithm for participants’ behavior and used a “factor score” in the form of a bar to display this on all participants’ profiles.

“Through this, the interaction between participants went through the roof” he recalls. ” We literally went from hundred of comments on idea pages one year to hundreds 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 lives 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 platform 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 platform, 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 training 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