When starting a company out of college or within your MBA I highly recommend talking to the entrepreneurship center of your school. Student entrepreneurs usually find a broad offering ranging from mentoring programs to office space to access to business angels and venture capital.

At Harvard, the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship  is doing a fantastic job. No wonder there has been so much entrepreneurship at HBS over the years. But not only at HBS or Harvard, most US educational institutions actually do a lot to promote entrepreneurship not only in classes, but by supporting their students and alumi starting new ventures . Long critiqued for a lack of entrepreneurship education and support for student and academic ventures, more and more German universities have established entrepreneurship centers as well. Pretty good examples I have personally worked with are the Spin-off Service of Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich as well as the Entrepreneurship program at Center for Digital Technology and Management, a joint center or Technical University Munich and Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich.

This is the first of a series of posts I will publish about startups of classmates and friends (or other people if they have a really bright idea…) – so lets start with honeywish:

honeywish is a Munich-based start-up company for which I helped writing their business plan during my second year at HBS and I continued to work with them for the summer after graduation. The wedding and honeymoon portal has launched a honeymoon registry for the German-speaking market in August 2009 and will shortly offer its cash bridal registry internationally. The idea behind this alternative wedding registry is to allow people to receive their honeymoon among other high value items as a joint gift from families and friends. Whether you plan to get married or not, honeywish is a venture you should definitely watch out for.

For my german-speaking readers: honeywish, die Hochzeitsreisen-Plattform präsentiert die besten Flitterwochen-Hotels wie zum Beispiel das Almond Beach Village. Mit Ihrem Hochzeitstisch speziell für die Flitterwochen will die Münchner Firma das Schenken zur Hochzeit revolutionieren. Definitiv ein Start-up, das man im Auge behalten sollte.

Website: http://www.honeywish.net/

My website recommendation of the day: www.Springwise.com

A network of scouts, looking for and writing about new, interesting business ideas – Brain food for Entrepreneurs!

This is how they describe their site:

Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts that are ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. We ferociously track more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets, cameras at hand.To ensure true ‘glocal’ coverage, the central office is in close contact with more than 8,000 Springspotters in over 70 countries worldwide. …

Springwise is required brain food for entrepreneurial minds! Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur, head of a start-up, management consultant, marketing manager, consumer insights expert, trend watcher, journalist, private investor, business development director, or venture capitalist, Springwise will instantly inspire you by getting the world’s most promising new business ideas and young ventures right in front of you.

Welcome to this blog. Here I want to write about interesting new startups, other classmates from Harvard who are entrepreneurs and new business ideas.

Looking forward to your comments, and if you were in my class and also started something, let me know and I will mention you here…