Let talented master students from the Business Development and Entrepreneurship program help boost your company's entrepreneurial capabilities. Covid-19 and the current competitive landscape requires that large and medium-sized organizations become more flexible, adaptive, and explore alternative (digital) business models. This commonly necessitates a more lean organization, creativity, experimentation, and collaborations with different parties. In the Intrapreneurship course (intrapreneurship = entrepreneurship within existing organizations) of the Business Development and Entrepreneurship Master, students help organizations to achieve such goals and provide host organizations with new insights, perspectives, and tools/frameworks. These insights are developed based on a combination of in-depth research within the host organization and the state-of-the-art in the academic literature.

Key features of the challenge

• Students work in teams of typically four students.
• In total, each team invests a minimum of 250 hours on this challenge.
• Teams are supervised by experts in the field of intrapreneurship who also have experience in consultancy work in this area.
• Project deliverables (e.g., report, presentation, workshop) are determined together with the host organizations.
• Teams attend a series of workshops to ensure methodological rigor.

Examples

• HR systems to stimulate employee creativity, intrapreneurship, or bottom-up innovation
• Stimulating social innovation and social intrapreneurship
• Leadership, organizational design, and employee proactivity/creativity.
• Implementation of lean start-up methodologies in large organizations.
• How to collaborate with start-ups? (corporate – start-up collaborations).
• Improving corporate incubators
• Improving corporate venturing programs
• Developing a corporate entrepreneurship ecosystem (i.e., with which partners should we collaborate to spur entrepreneurship/innovation?)
• Support for innovative ideas

Company requirements

For-profit, non-profit, and governmental institutions can submit a challenge. Smaller organizations (> 25 employees) can also submit a challenge provided that these are high growth organizations.

Costs

To help facilitate this challenge a small fee of €500,- (ex tax) per team applies. PLEASE NOTE: You will only be charged when matched to a team.

Organizations are expected to appoint a key contact person that invests between 4-6 hours (e.g., joining the online kick-off, final presentations, providing information, answering questions). In addition, most assignments require students to collect data at the organization. Depending on the type of data (e.g., interview data, focus groups, quantitative data) the time investment of other organizational members might vary. Typically, the data collection requires a time investment between 6-10 hours in total.

Planning

• August 22: Deadline to submit a challenge (we might be ‘sold out’ before this date)
• September 7: Sharing the challenges with the teams.
• September 9: Teams hand in their top five of challenges including a brief motivation why they want to solve this challenge. The companies receive an overview of the teams that have chosen their challenge.
• September 11: The companies indicate their preference regarding the team(s) they want to work with.
• September 14: Our matching algorithm will create perfect matches. Matches are shared with the teams and companies.
• September 16 (morning): Official kick-off (organized online) during which the companies will briefly introduce themselves and their challenge. Subsequently, the teams will have an online meeting with the assigned company (making use of breakout rooms) to ask questions and to make plans and agreements. Location: Zoom