BuddyGuide - your travelling companion
The first Zollverein School spin-off is on its way: with the innovative Buddy Guide concept, a couple of the Zollverein School’s first MBA students set off their own business.
BuddyGuide is a new, international, personal and unique guiding system. The idea for this system was born at the Zollverein School of Management and Design within the first Trimester of the first class in July 2005. Thinking about the complexity of the Ruhrgebiet and triggered by the possibilities to develop a unique orientation system for the Kulturhauptstadt 2010, the Zollverein Students Anja Soeder, Norwin Kandera, Martin Mangold, Ole Schilling and Robert Tyborsky designed a concept for a specific business model, which allows a tourist or visitor to get to know to the city via a second person, an insider, a local. In reality at best picked up at the train station or at the airport, two people meet, that have upgraded their interest already via internet. Then they can start a tour for an hour or more to adventure the interesting things in every day life.
The idea of the BuddyGuide system fascinated already various people and newspapers throughout Germany. It won the Future Design Award of NRW, nominated with 10 000 €. And now, what seemed to be just a good idea is slowly becoming reality.
Today it is the business start-up BuddyGuide GbR located on the Zollverein Campus. Buddy Guide will officially start in Summer 2006: At minimum five real Buddies will be at service for the FIFA World Cup, the design event ENTRY 2006 in Essen and for the Zollverein School (fee about 50 € an hour) throughout this year. And this action will serve as a proof whether the system BuddyGuide can work in Europe and globally.
More information www.buddyguide.org
February 22nd, 2006 at 18:01 pm
Creativity and design to transform a former coalmine area…
The former coalmine area of Zollverein has become a symbol of structural change in the Ruhrgebiet of Germany. The large scale interventions taking place there are an example of how creative industries can become the engine of economic transformation. …
March 8th, 2006 at 17:01 pm
[…] In order to reflect and share this development one of the next projects or add-ons for this blog is a sort of library where our current MBA students present their favourite books as well as edited postings about their projects just like the BuddyGuide project Martin Mangold has written about recently. In the course of these developments Zollverein MBA student Hannes Hofmann from Italy (Südtirol) contacted me earlier this week with two challenging questions or statements: […]