Zollverein School Blog

Good news: The first Zollverein School spin-off is on its way! With the innovative BuddyGuide concept, three of Zollverein School’s class of 2006 MBA students kicked-off their own business, which can be tested for a duration of two weeks at the Entry2006 in Essen, Germany. From September 23rd, 2006 up to the October 8th, 2006 six to ten Buddyguides can be booked around the Zollverein Symposium.

BuddyGuide is a unique, innovative, personalized and internationally oriented guidance system. The idea for this system was born at the Zollverein School of Management and Design within the first Trimester of the first MBA class in July 2005.

Thinking about the complexity of the Ruhrgebiet and triggered by the opportunities to develop a unique orientation system for the “Kulturhauptstadt 2010 (European Cultural Capital 2010)”, Zollverein Students Anja Soeder, Norwin Kandera, Martin Mangold, Ole Schilling and Robert Tyborsky designed a concept for an innovative business model, which allows a tourist or visitor to get to know the city via a second person, an insider or a resident.

At best the visitor gets picked up at the train station or at the airport. Accordingly two people meet who have already exchanged their preferences via the Internet. Finally they can start a tour for an hour or more to experience the interesting things of every day life around Zollverein.

The idea of the BuddyGuide system already attracted various people as well as newspapers throughout Germany and finally won the Future Design Award of NRW, awarded with Euro 10.000 last year. And now, what appeared to be just a good idea is more and more becoming reality.

The BuddyGuide GbR located on the Zollverein Campus organized a reality check with real Buddies that will be at your service for the international design event ENTRY2006 in Essen as well as during the Zollverein School Symposium. Contractual details for the service are negotiated between the BuddyGuide and the customer at reasonable prices.

For booking a Buddy please call +49.201.2895812 and discuss your needs and further details with the company Zeitsprung (Link to be provided soon). From middle of September onwards our internet platform will present the Buddies while online booking is not implemented yet.

After all this action will certainly prove whether the BuddyGuide system might work locally as well as on an international scale. Try it out!

For further questions just send an email to: .

This entry was posted by Martin Mangold on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 14:13 pm and is filed under Announcement, Events, Student projects, ZSchool Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.