An Economic Summit for the Next Generation: BBS Wirtschaft 1 Ludwigshafen Scoops the 2017 YES! Award

How can we unmask fake news? What are the opportunities and risks of innovation strategies? Can we make European integration work? These are just some of the serious challenges our society finds itself faced with. On 28 and 29 September 2017, around 200 high school students presented and debated their solutions to a number of global economic issues at the third YES! – Young Economic Summit in Kiel. BBS Wirtschaft 1 Ludwigshafen’s idea for a “company gateway” for start-ups was particularly convincing and was honoured with the 2017 YES! Award. ZEW is a YES! research partner and mentored the winning team as well as ten other teams from the Southwest region.

The teams from the Southwest met with teams from Northern Germany for the two-day event held at the Regionales Berufsbildungszentrum Wirtschaft (RBZ, regional vocational training centre for economics) in Kiel. Together they discussed a number of global economic and social challenges facing us today. The thirteen teams from Baden-Württemberg, Hamburg, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein were greeted via video link by Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Brigitte Zypries, who praised the hard work and commitment of all the students involved, saying: “We need people like you. This country needs creative ideas.”

Students develop an idea to support start-up businesses

How can the founding of start-up businesses be made quick and effective? This was the question tackled by the YES! team from BBS Wirtschaft 1 Ludwigshafen in their project under the topic of National Innovation Strategies. Their solution envisaged the development of a public facility that would provide advice to start-ups throughout their founding and early development. Team members Benjamin Döring, Adrian Roth, Felix Degen, Felix Mutter and Lukas Dissinger spent several months working on the project. Bejaming Döring presented their idea at the YES! final:  “Germany needs entrepreneurs. We want to support start-ups through our ‘company gateway’. This will help to strengthen competition and encourage innovation.”

Ludwigshafen students triumph at 2017 YES! final

All the other teams in the competition also presented their ideas. Following their presentations, each team then had to debate their idea with experts from the fields of science, economics, politics and civil society and take questions from the other participants at the YES! Summit. On the second day of the competition the young people then voted for what they thought was the best solution and therefore the winning team in Germany’s biggest economics competition for high school students. The team from BBS Wirtschaft 1 Ludwigshafen came top in the vote. In second place came the team from Richard-Hallmann-Schule in Trappenkamp, while third place went to Heinrich-Heine-Gymnasium in Hamburg.

The winning teams were announced by Minister President of Schleswig-Holstein Daniel Günther, who was greatly impressed by the students’ achievements: “Everyone who took part today is a winner. You all took on the challenge of finding solutions for some of the most urgent problems of our time – and in English too, a language that is not your native tongue. Your dedication and commitment has been exemplary. I would like to thank you all for taking part.” An official award ceremony will take place on 8 November at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in Berlin, patron of the YES! programme.

YES! will be back in 2018

Next year the YES! competition will be expanded once more to give students in Brandenburg, Berlin, Saxony-Anhalt, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern the chance to take part.  By 2019, YES! should be a nationwide competition in Germany.

About YES!

The YES! – Young Economic Summit is one of the biggest school competitions aimed at getting young people to engage with economic and social issues. High school students come up with their own solutions to global economic, ecological and social problems and present them as part of a conference for other students, the YES! – Young Economic Summit. Through discussions with leading economists and other students, they focus on global connections and develop their own innovative solutions. The best solutions are determined by a vote. The winning solutions are awarded a prize and publicly forwarded to those in a position to investigate how they might be put into practice.

In the run-up to YES! all students participating in the project receive continued support and guidance in topics such as how to carry out research, give presentations and engage with the media. YES! included these topics following the recommendation from the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs that high school students should be taught how to exercise critical judgement when using media applications. The “YES! – Young Economic Summit” falls under the patronage of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs Brigitte Zypries and is a joint project by the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the Joachim Herz Stiftung. The Leibniz Association's scientific partner institutions are the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) and the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg.