We are proud to announce that InnoEnergy and XCNT are co-sponsoring (50/50) a full waiver for a female student of the Master’s in Energy Technologies who will begin the programme in September 2020.
Here are the three reasons why XCNT funded this scholarship:
At XCNT our biggest challenge is not about having “enough” and “good” ideas. Instead our most important job is to find entrepreneurial talents who combine technical expertise with business skills and motivation.
We were very impressed when we got introduced to InnoEnergy’s Master School. Not only does InnoEnergy offer a well-composed curriculum for future engineers and leaders of the European energy transition, it also features an impressive track record of entrepreneurs among the graduates of the Master’s programme.
We love the Master School that InnoEnergy has created and we believe that XCNT can offer complementary learning experiences to students, either as Summer Interns or as young professionals after graduation.
Generally speaking, diverse founding teams outperform teams that exhibit implicit biases of any kinds. Unfortunately, we have observed that the ratio of women applying to our job postings is very low. This is a serious issue for us because it makes it extra hard to recruit diverse founding teams on our ventures. On one hand we are going to address this issue by improving the way we present XCNT and our job opportunities to a diverse audience. On the other hand we created this scholarship in order to support the education of women in a technical Master's programme.
We know that underrepresentation of women in STEM jobs and entrepreneurship isn’t something that will change over night. But we are glad to make a small difference by investing in a young woman with entrepreneurial ambition who could someday be a co-founder at XCNT developing the green new business models our world so desperately needs.
Financial dependencies like a student loan can keep an entrepreneurial mind from actually going “all-in” and taking the risk of becoming a founder. Some of the XCNT team members have experienced this first-hand.
Through the Entrepreneurial Scholarship we hope to give financial independency to one student who wants to take the leap and become an entrepreneur in the future. Who knows, maybe the scholarship holder will be the one to launch the next big thing or maybe she won’t. Either way, we are going to root for her along the journey.
We are looking forward to playing an active role in the InnoEnergy ecosystem.
