Planning mobility measures sustainably with Klimeva
A team of students from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim/Holzminden/Göttingen (HAWK) and the Faculty of Business and Economics at the Georg-August Universität Göttingen has developed the evaluation tool "klimeva" and obtained the Lower Saxony start-up grant for it.
The tool is intended for use in municipalities and small and medium-sized enterprises and is designed to support them in planning, managing and evaluating mobility measures in a sustainable way.
We spoke to the team behind "klimeva".
1) What is klimeva?
"klimeva" is a cloud-based tool for evaluating and optimising corporate mobility and is used in the area of vehicle fleets and commuting mobility. We want to offer companies an intuitive tool as a software-as-a-service to analyse and subsequently optimise their ecological footprint in corporate mobility - and thus also enable climate protection reports without restrictions in everyday business, which are increasingly demanded by the economic and legal side.
2) How did the project come about?
The idea arose from a third-party funded project at HAWK, Faculty of Resource Management. There, we had the task of evaluating climate protection measures in the operational mobility of a district administration in southern Lower Saxony with regard to greenhouse gas emissions and costs. In the process, we discovered that supporting applications for climate protection and its business relevance are lacking at this point, enabling companies and public sector institutions to analyse their own activities in this area without further ado.
3) Who is involved?
Currently, Manuel Zech and Lorenz Schöggl, two students from the Master's programme in Business Information Systems at the Faculty of Business and Economics, are involved, Niklas Wilke is now a graduate of the HAWK's Digital Environments programme and Eike Matthies is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the Georgia-Augusta, who is also a research assistant at the HAWK.
4) What role have the students taken on in the project?
We divide the work according to our skills and competences. The business informatics students are responsible in particular for development, but also for administrative activities. Manuel and Lorenz are versatile and handle business and operational challenges as well as software development and IT administration.
What the students say:
Lorenz Schöggl:
"The start-up alone is an adventure that lets us apply business know-how live - in the process, we experience all the ups and downs of entrepreneurship first-hand. Challenges with data protection and IT security that we know from our studies have now become real and exciting everyday life.
At the same time, the experiences are unique: especially as a young start-up, you come into contact simultaneously with all areas from sales to legal and operational challenges to the IT administration of a company infrastructure.
It feels like an adventurous journey into the corporate world, stopping in all departments at once - coupled with a jump into cold water. But luckily we learned how to swim in our versatile degree programme :).
The start-up demands our business management skills, software development challenges us as computer scientists. And all questions from IT project management to software engineering to data protection fit ideally into our own discipline of business informatics. There is no better combination. With software-as-a-service and climate protection, it is currently also gaining special relevance.
So the start-up is ideal for applying the study content and as experience for the CV. It's just a pity that the compatibility with studies always remains a challenge. The experiences cannot be credited in any way, as even the open and accredited internship module, which aims at such real experiences, excludes start-ups, as own companies are not considered."
Manuel Zech:
"The original motivation to do "something practical" as a Bachelor's thesis quickly turned into more due to the great cooperation in the team. After we realised that the project could also be more than just a Bachelor's thesis, we looked around for opportunities for support with the spin-off. That alone was a great learning experience with many interesting contacts!
In the course of developing klimeva, we conducted numerous talks and tests with the target group and received a lot of feedback. This approach allowed us to gain a lot of valuable experience in agile software development, marketing & sales and the business aspects of a software development. This practical experience was very helpful in further penetrating the subject matter of the Master's degree."
6) What are you working on at the moment?
Currently, the software is being tested many times and is finding its way into use in companies. Chambers of industry and commerce in particular, as well as medium-sized companies and public institutions, appreciate the efficient support for their climate protection measures.
7) What are your plans for the future?
We are constantly working on the further development of klimeva and thus try to identify further business cases on the one hand and contribute to climate protection and digitalisation on the other. Currently, Manuel Zech and Lorenz Schöggl are developing the software further as part of their Master's project studies at the Chair of Information Management of Prof. Dr. Kolbe in order to serve a sought-after gap in the market with the analysis of employee mobility.
8) Do you want to start your own business with the product or how will it be made available to companies?
We have set up a GbR to market klimeva so that we can serve the demand directly and further develop our own skills and competences. What happens next remains to be seen, but is definitely exciting.
[Updated: April 2023]