OPINION! Deskmag founder Carsten Foertsch on his experience with bureaucracy: “Kick ass for companies from young branches of industry!”

Carsten Foertsch just founded Deskmag, a magazine about new workspaces, what they look like, how they work, how they can be improved and how we work in them. In the interview he talks about the bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of start-ups in Germany. The interview originated from mine Quote on one ZEIT ONLINE-Contribution.

Carsten Foertsch studied political science, sociology and geography in Berlin and graduated in 2006. After that he worked as a researcher Employees in an institute for social science studies with a focus on urban and regional development and the labor market. In mid-2010 he co-founded Deskwanted, a job search system and Deskmag magazine, with Joel Alas.

What are the main obstacles to business start-ups in German administrations?

A special Problem This is especially the case in German administrations and their private-law sub-companies Age their employees, that clear above the average for the working-age population. Just be in Berlin Boy People are rarely hired. Less than 2,5% of the people who work in the Berlin administrations are 30 years old or younger.

What is the problem for founders?

In public administrations and banks, therefore, people are increasingly working with little knowledge of current knowledge. Especially companies in new economic sectors of the creative industry have a hard time. The employees in administrations are hardly aware of new technologies.

The books on the subject (advertising)

A study shows that you still use social media applications in the administrations!

The use of social media does not automatically guarantee a transfer of knowledge. Social media is, when the sender and the receiver get into each other, the sender also becomes the receiver and vice versa. Only this interaction makes social media social.

And useful it will only when the results of this Communication positively influence the work in the administration. So far I haven't seen that in most administrations. As a rule, it is just an additional one-way channel. In addition, their use in no case replaces the personal one Contact to young colleagues who are missing in the administration.

Certainly also a question of money ...

Social media activities, like many other jobs, are increasingly being carried out by external companies. That lowers the Costs, bundles information. But in the end it works like in the game of silent mail, the message at the beginning is not the message at the end, especially if the people in the administration don't have the knowledge to do so Background to evaluate this commissioned work correctly. Even the best external commissioned work is of no use to them.

Discounts for your success (advertising)!

The Berlin administration is an extreme example. The Senate stands with the dismantling of the dept faced with an understandably big problem. Due to one of the conclusions he drew from this, the hiring freeze that lasted for years, the Berlin administrations did not receive any fresh input of internal expert knowledge and verlieren therefore, since the mid-90s, the connection to the economic, technical and educational innovations. More on that in the dayspiegel.

So you do not promote what you do not know?

Exactly: long-established branches of the economy are definitely supported. Especially in the example of the creative sector, the difference between fashion, a trade that is thousands of years old, and companies that are their Income solely through their knowledge in new branches of the economy.

Fashion is encouraged - see Fashion Week and Bread and Butter. Maybe still things with Art or classic media when you think of the Kunsthalle or television stations that have since failed. This also includes the newly planned state library. There is no trace of new usage concepts. An old Concept in new rooms.

Do you have better ideas?

Yes. Why can people today not release their own works through the library for free and have them rated by the registered users? Why do libraries lend their core competencies to new media - Google or Apple - if they could catalog it for a membership fee that is more independent and more appropriate to the topic?

What I mean is that the administration does not even promote new concepts internally and ideas. You can calculate how difficult it is for business founders when they come up with new ideas from outside.

That sounds a little frustrated ...

No, I don't want to play the individual economic sectors off against each other. On the contrary. If it's not about individual companies or Founders but about industry meetings, the Senate even supports them quite easily with small sums, a kind of small subsidy for temporarily self-organized help for self-help. The people at Projekt help with that Future or Berlin partners fast continue.

What the Senate does through its internal unilateral personnel policy is, unfortunately, a huge waste of economic potential. If the people from the fields are already missing, he could freed more people from the administration at least for individual branch meetings in order to strengthen their understanding of new economic areas. This would also be a new understanding of economic promotion. The administration should not wait until the people come to them. You should also actively find the contact yourself more often.

In the interview Christoph Lang from Berlin Partner referred to the support of Investitionsbank Berlin ...

Yes, the investment bank advertises everywhere with loans for start-ups. However, it does so more for the image of the location of Berlin. The reality is different. But if it were only that ...

What else?

Not only do most companies from emerging industries receive support, they also waste their precious time applying for support, which is rejected out of ignorance without serious processing. It concerns just the simple programs of the IBB.

With microcredits of ten or twenty thousand euros, many people in Berlin can already do something to stand on their own two feet. Especially from the creative sector, where most start as self-employed or small entrepreneurs. However, the IBB lacks the necessary information for the assessment Expertise. Restaurants and gas-water-plumbing are not a problem, but everything you don't know yet, where you haven't built up any expertise yet, is not funded.

After all, you can try it ...

The applicants later lack the time for the failed applications when setting up theirs Company. So you get the opposite of support, which is a kick in the ass and a loss of time that can quickly become a competitive disadvantage.

It would be more straightforward and easier for everyone to predict which directives they promote. It should be based on transparency as a misleading PR Bla Bla.

Perhaps one must explain the administration of this problem ...

The Berlin administration has been practicing this approach for almost 15 years without learning from its mistakes. I happened to find a nice example in a text about this Internet-Company Zanox. There it says: As early as 1997, business informatics students developed the visionary project Inab (an abbreviation for “Internet address book”), a website for storing and managing bookmarks. With their diploma thesis they participate in a Business Plan competition of the Berlin business start-up forum, the Sparkasse and the Stern, but they are obviously ahead of their time with this project. In any case, the jury cannot convince the young entrepreneurs of their visionary business model: in the competition, they are subject to a Berlin “slice delivery service”.

And today, social bookmarking services are the racers ... How can such a thing happen?

I think they are rather the exception. At the IBB business plan competition last year, a bicycle wash, a childcare service and a textile care department won in the service area Online-Concert rating portal and online generation project. It wasn't even about applying for a loan, for which you have to strip naked and more people are left behind.

I don't want to be misunderstood, there are all great things, but the IBB could have distinguished something like this ten years ago. Not a really completely new thing – with so many applications. And now imagine, against this background, you want to Money apply to the IBB.

What happens then?

Microcredits are generally rejected if no operating profit can be made within six to nine months to pay for the loan installments. This is true for many online businesses that need to build their reputation and generate traffic in order to make money to earn.

This usually takes at least a year or two. However, they do not offer a special support program with small loans. Twitter only started making profits five years after its existence. It took Google three years to do this. And small companies create many more jobs than large companies. Special microloans that take this into account would really be worthwhile. However, the current microcredits are only a product of the time in which the short-term Success counts more than the long-term Perspektive.

How does it look for you?

We do not earn anything with our magazine at the moment, so we started the Deskmag in October of last year. We currently source our income from individually prepared market analyzes. General summaries are available to all those interested free of charge on the Deskmag.

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