ABSTRACT
Starting a business from one of Germany's state broadcaster's consumer-rights/financial advice programmes seems a message for our times. The notion of setting up businesses has spread to British universities which encourage commercial 'entrepreneurship' among academics. The variety of 'business' Villette and Vuillermot refer to is the self-managing, entrepreneurial version not prevalent in planned economies. At a national German level, a common rhetorical tool used by authors to render business persons attractive characters to be emulated, involves a shifting from the indefinite person to the definite. This chapter which links these entrepreneur guidebooks to a larger audience is entitled Grndergeschichten, a compendium of the business histories of the winners of the Deutscher Grnderpreis, or 'German start-up prize'. The Stern competition mentioned above also had a prize for school-based companies.
