As part of the project "Data Literacy and Data Science for SMEs: Education and Qualification", nine universities in Baden-Württemberg strengthen the skills of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the collection and analysis of massive amounts of data with offerings for education and qualification. These offerings are tailored to the needs of SMEs and provide solutions for currently relevant problems in data analysis and evaluation. The most commonly cited reasons for the currently low acceptance of data science in SMEs are a lack of application examples, excessively high costs and a lack of knowledge about the benefits of big data and big data analyses for one's own company. The consortium's education offerings show that data analyses and their evaluation are of great benefit especially for SMEs by providing concrete application examples. Within these education courses, participating companies can bring in and discuss problems relating to their own specific business context as well.

Within the scope of this project and as part of the consortium, we develop keynotes and workshop formats that deal in particular with the development of data-based business models and the human-centric development method Design Thinking which is helpful in this respect. In these workshops, we collaborate with employees from SMEs to unlock their potential of digital innovation between customer requirements and data exploitation. Due to the effects of the corona pandemic, we currently plan to offer digital events in the second half of 2020.

The project "Data Literacy and Data Science for SMEs: Education and Qualification" is funded by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration Baden-Württemberg from the European Social Fund and the Ministry of Science, Research and Art Baden-Württemberg until the end of 2021.