Consulting & Projects

Partner: Aesculap AG & Co. KG
Project: B. Braun-Award for Social Innovations 2014

As a successor of the environmental award presented for years by the B. Braun division Aesculap, Zeppelin University has developed the "B. Braun-Award for Social Innovations" and implemented it in close cooperation with Aesculap. Every year the award, first offered in 2013 and worth 25,000 Euro, recognizes and promotes initiatives that effectively address social problems in new ways.

In 2013, the first prize, worth 10,000 Euro, was awarded to the initiative "Skipsy" in Singen. "Skipsy" is a group offer for children, teenagers, and young adults from the regions Singen, Radolfzell, and Höri who come from families with mentally ill parents. In six different age groups, the children and teenagers address the family issue in a creative and playful way - through music, encounters, games, role plays, books, and many more.


Partner: AMADEUS IT Group S.A.
Project: All Ways Travelling

The debate on the mobility of the 21st century is gaining momentum, just as is the mobility turnaround as a transformational process under discussion. For its (interim) results, the intelligent linking of the different modes of transport will be essential. Even the European Commission is asking the question why the so-called intermodality does not yet function properly and why, for example, there is no booking system that allows you to plan and make a trip from Ljubljana to Lisbon. And thus they commissioned a consortium consisting of Zeppelin University, the Amadeus IT Group, and additional players from the European mobility sector to develop theoretical answers and practical solutions. At ZU, an interdisciplinary research team chaired by Professor Dr Alexander Eisenkopf is researching the economic, social, and legal-regulatory requirements, before developing and testing the prototype of a pan-European booking system for intermodal mobility in a pilot project.

Partner: Wüstenrot Stiftung
Project: The Lake Constance Region as a Transnational Region
In this study, the Chair for Political and Administrative Sciences is researching the already existing, transnational cooperations in the Euroregion Lake Constance. In addition to the economic and cultural cooperation, the focus is also on the political collaboration of the neighboring countries around Lake Constance. It shows where cooperation is already taking place, where it is still completely missing, and how the Lake Constance region acts compared to other border areas, such as the Saarland or the Lower Rhine region.

Partner: BMW Group Munich
Project: MINI Reloaded

Project Description: The project deals with the future of the brand MINI and addresses the issues of the definition of MINI´s vision by the year 2020 and beyond, the importance of the brand MINI, the specification of a future-oriented business model, as well as the identification and implementation of new business potentials. Additionally, the term "premium", its perception among the generation Y, and its role concerning purchase decisions was analyzed.

Partner: EVONIK Industries
Project: Storytelling to Visualize High Performance Plastics

The solar industry is booming; yet, to keep up with conventional energy producers, production and installation costs have to be reduced drastically. Modern thin-film technology, in combination with high performance plastics, could be a possible approach. A student team of ZU was involved in naming and the marketing strategy. Apparently so successfully that a competition for ZU students has been the result: To visualize the benefit of high performance plastics for the end-consumer, memorable stories are to be developed and integrated into a marketing and advertising strategy. The ideas of the three best teams were awarded a prize.

Partner: Nolte Möbel
Project: Social Media @ Nolte

As one of Europe´s largest producers, the Nolte-Group produces furniture of an exceptional quality. In a workshop on "employer branding" with ZU students it has become obvious that this issue also entails a special quality: For who is better able to work with an organization on questions of the ways of communication and the employer preferences of a certain generation than its members? Following exactly this logic a student consulting project under the supervision of ZU PhD-candidate Christian Schmidt has developed. The task: To develop a social media strategy for the Nolte-Gruppe.

Partner: Margarete Steiff GmbH
Project: Repositioning of the Steiff-Museum in Giengen

On the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the company Margarete Steiff, the new museum was opened in 2005. The operation of the Steiff Museum was a completely new business area for the Steiff GmbH - one in the area of tourism - and posed many challenges: How can Steiff keep up the museum´s long-term attractiveness? What should the communication with the respective target groups be like? Which role can events play and how can the interaction with visitors be increased? Following a ZU-internal pitch of several teams, the winning team could start implementing their ideas in the summer of 2009. Successfully, as not least the numerous new event concepts of the museum show.

Partner: Intersky Luftfahrt GmbH
Project: Brand Perception of the Regional Airline

How does the population perceive InterSky, the largest airline at the Bodensee-Airport Friedrichshafen, as a brand? To answer this question two ZU students started off to develop a market analysis for the InterSky Luftfahrt GmbH. Over a period of four weeks, more than 1,000 surveys were sent out by e-mail and fax in the three-country region of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and afterwards evaluated using demographic information. Based on these results, at the moment a repositioning of the brand of InterSky is taking place in order to make the population notice the brand even more in future.

Partner: BMW Group Munich
Project: Car Sales of the Future, Using the Example of MINI

When in 2001 the BMW Group decided to relaunch the cult car MINI, the brand development of MINI posed the challenge of combining the status of a "cult object" with a new product to result in a clear, uniform profile world-wide. With the aims to position MINI in the premium segment and to further develop the maximum differentiation to the brand of BMW, innovative concepts for the future European distribution of this unique brand were developed as part of the project "Distribution 2025" - ensuring that they fit to the positioning of MINI as a lifestyle product.

Partner: ZF Friedrichshafen
Project: Design of a ZF Think Tank

The aim of the think tank is the systematic recognition, discussion, and evaluation of future trends to increase competitiveness. Just as important is the development of business models and the search for growth opportunities around the current and future core business. The main task is to analyze possible organizational occurrences and to make recommendations. Based on this, the concrete tasks and contents of the think tank were drafted and transferred to an economic feasibility study.

Partner: Börlind Gesellschaft für kosmetische Erzeugnisse mbH
Project: Development of a Strategy of Sustainability

The already taken measures in the area of sustainability management and the company-specific greenhouse gas emissions are recorded and documented to set the starting point for deriving optimization measures using both industry-specific as well as intersectoral best practice analyses. The findings are to be evaluated together in a final workshop to define operationalized targets to reach the higher-ranking aim.