Maximilian Eckel

Member of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship (WIN) chair and the Entrepreneurship Center of RWTH Aachen. I head the coaching of students and researchers that are in the process of founding their own startups by managing a high-profile team with backgrounds in strategy consulting, blue chips, and the startup world. Starting in 2019, RWTH received 8-digit funding to advance its entrepreneurship support which gives us the opportunity to bring our coaching to the next level.

WorkSpex makes the intangible "human element" in companies measurable by motivating employees to give extensive and regular feedback. It is based on the technology and principles developed with my co-founders during our first venture, Goodnity. Due to my knowledge of the technology and my established network, I helped kickstart the new company by adjusting our old product, acquiring the first customers and investors, and developing the basic framework for the new product.

Goodnity motivated young audiences to participate in market research and philanthropy by providing charitable donations for answering mobile surveys. Among other things, we secured 6-digit funding from the EU, the German Ministry of Economics, and business angels, received positive media coverage, and built an outstandingly active user base. The cycle-length and project-character of our sales efforts and therefore missing scalability led us to re-evaluate our business model and form a new company.

3DS is an international startup incubation event series, nationally organized by WHU and RWTH Aachen. I was responsible for managing the student teams (around 30 students) and the relationships with old and new corporate sponsors, startup investors, mentors, and international university partners.

I worked directly with the Head of Consulting Practice and got entrusted with researching and preparing the currently emerging topic of “Industry 4.0” as well as with the development of potential case studies. I was consequently staffed to participate in digitization projects and to contribute to sales proposals for leading German companies from different industries.

After completing multiple trainings and workshops in different Change Management theories and Scholar Consult’s methods in particular, I was staffed on a project with one of Japan’s leading infrastructure companies to help the company in its endeavors to internationalize.

I was trained in analyzing data from Google Analytics and was entrusted with finding new patterns for customer behavior in addition to managing my own Google AdWords budget. Additionally, through access to all purchase and inventory databases, I successfully built a cross-selling mechanism to match existing customers with potentially interesting books that directly yielded additional sales.

I interned at a German “Mittelstand”-company to determine that business administration was the right field for my studies. I conducted a market research project on the Chilean livestock market. Further, I analyzed and processed the financial statements of competitor companies and helped automate individual tasks that were previously performed manually.

Focus areas: Entrepreneurship, Innovation Policy Final thesis: “Purposeful Partnership? Articulation of Social Needs between Policy Makers and Entrepreneurs”; Grade: 8.5 (Equivalents: Germany: 1.0; USA: A)

Finance, Mathematik, Entrepreneurship

Nautik, Projektmanagement, Physik