Attracting Young Talent: Insights from the Xeem Romp Challenge for Medium-Sized Cities

“What does a medium-sized city need so that young people will continue to find it attractive in the future so that they want to live and work there?” That’s exactly what KREFELD BUSINESS wanted to know from digitally savvy young professionals, students and other smart people who are on the online platform Xeem “romp”.

This is a tool co-developed by Janine Weirich, a business founder from Darmstadt, in which competitions are held that encourage tomorrow’s specialists and managers in teams or individually to want to help shape the future with their ideas, to gain practical experience and to make contacts with companies to build. Maybe some of you know the platform from TV, as it was presented in the format “The Lion’s Den”.

Ten teams took on this first city-related Xeem challenge and submitted their dream city ideas. Six teams of two traveled to Krefeld for the “pitch”; the others were connected virtually or had prepared videos. And so the jury had over ten entries from young talents, schoolchildren, students and young professionals between 17 and 37 from Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Groß-Gerau, Groß-Zimmern, Cologne, Bornheim, Mönchengladbach, Wuppertal, Mülheim an der Ruhr and Bad Oldesloe to be located. A similarly broad spectrum was evident in the underlying knowledge: the participants had economics and business management, psychological, legal, educational, engineering, scientific or creative economics know-how.

Within 20 minutes, they presented the “look and feel” of their medium-sized dream city and supported their solution approaches with data research and scientific evaluations. Afterwards, the seven-person jury had the opportunity to ask questions. The assessment criteria used were, for example, the variety of topics, the depth of detail, sustainability and diversity aspects, feasibility and the manner of presentation.

At the end of a long day in which one presentation “chased” another, Eckart Preen, head of KREFELD BUSINESS, and the other jurors were clear: “It was simply phenomenal what was presented to us today in an excellent manner. The content and performance were equally convincing. We hoped that this pitch would provide fresh, “grandchildren-worthy” ideas from outside about urban design and development. With an open perspective, the participants designed visionary future scenarios for their dream city that met our criteria. Our expectations were clearly exceeded. What we don’t want to keep to ourselves – it’s now important to make this world of ideas accessible to various committees, initiatives and urban society in order to incorporate some of it into urban development processes in the medium and long term.” And Annegret Angerhausen-Reuter, press spokeswoman and project coordinator for this Challenge, added: “As far as we know, we are the first economic development agency to approach such an important future issue in this way. This approach was rewarded with many good ideas, new contacts and an innovative view of Krefeld from the participants.”

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