Ulrike (Uli) is the founder and owner of two companies. Women’s Springboard is a community for female business owners which offers membership programmes in expertise, authorship and feminine leadership. Springboard Edition is a publishing house, content provider and organizer of online-courses, memberships and online-summits for business experts. As a business designer Ulrike loves to provide tailor-made business models and to help businesses solve client problems more effectively. She is also a Senior Design and Management Professional with advanced knowledge in design and management disciplines and the proven ability to combine, design and plan strategy, marketing and design. She invests in further education and has been a trainer in Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg) since 2014. She helps both English and German speaking clients from Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and the United States to develop business models. She is also an experienced author and speaker and likes to inspire her audience.
Ulrike started her career with formal training as a typographer and won State and National Awards. She studied in Mainz, Germany in communication design (University of Applied Sciences Mainz, diploma, 1989 – 1994) and business administration (Verwaltungs und Wirtschaftsakademie, diploma 1996 -1999). In 1994 she started a successful design agency in the Rhine-Main-area and worked for private and public clients such as Deutsche Bank, AirLiquide and the states of Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate. One of her projects was to design and manage a network of players in the health economy on behalf of a German state ministry (economy, department of innovation). This venture was supported by two other ministries (social, education) and players included companies (SME, global), Universities, health insurances etc. The purpose was to enhance innovation and to support and provide the creation of new work places by connecting players and by regional, national and EU-funding projects.
Academic Teaching
Ulrike has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor for two courses: Communication design at The University of Applied Sciences in Neu-Ulm, 2012-2017 for BA and MA students and Media design at The University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, 2016 for BA students and practitioners).
Academic Research
As an experienced Scuba-diver, Ulrike has a passion for diving into the sea. She also has a tendency to delve into academic topics that interest her. She identified something intriguing from her personal experience of working with groups as participant, co-facilitator and facilitator – the state of full immersion, known as ‘flow-experience’. She recognized this state in groups and wanted to know more about the phenomenon. This led to her embarking on doctoral research in a DBA-programme at University of Gloucestershire, United Kingdom (School of Business and Technology) in 2018. In 2020 she transferred to a PhD as her research has become more theoretical. The title of this empirical, process-oriented study is “A theory to emerge flow in teams” and it aims to synthesize a theory for the deliberate emergence of flow experience in teams within organizations.