Let a team of Master Business Administration students help you with your startup scalability challenges related to organizational design, team composition, and company culture.
✅ Key features of the challenge
Students per team: 4-5 students
Programme: Master Business Administration (UvA)
Course: Rethinking Startup Scalability: People and Organisational Issues
No. of hours spent per team: 120 hours
Duration: April – May
Deliverables: Presentation and report (in the form of slides) with recommendations and an implementation plan.
Company time investment: 4-10 hours (short meetings, interviews, final presentation, etc.)
Matching fee: None
📑 What kind of challenge fits this course?
We love working with ambitious startups and scale-ups that are growing fast and want to build an organization that can truly support that growth. The best-fit challenges are people and organizational questions that matter deeply as a company evolves: shaping a strong culture, improving hiring and onboarding, strengthening retention, clarifying roles and decision-making, designing a more effective structure, improving collaboration in hybrid teams, or building a more inclusive organization through better DEI practices.
This course is NOT the right fit for purely commercial or technical questions. If your main challenge is sales, marketing, internationalization, fundraising, product development, legal, finance, or operational or technical optimization without a clear people or organizational dimension, we are probably not the best match. We also do not act as a recruitment agency or take on purely executional HR work. What we do best is help companies think through the strategic people and organizational challenges behind growth.
If your question is essentially, “How can we scale our team, structure, leadership, hiring, or culture in a way that is thoughtful, sustainable, and true to who we are?” then this course is likely a very strong fit. We would be excited to hear your challenge!
Challenge Examples
The student teams can work on challenges like, but not limited to, the following:
Help us select and implement a suitable organizational structure to facilitate role definition and decision-making rights during rapid growth.
Advise us on how to build a scalable talent acquisition strategy.
Investigate our company culture and advise us on how to determine the cultural attributes that matter most as we scale.
Help us approach the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion and develop an adaptive toolbox for more inclusive scaling.
🏢 Requirement for participating companies
Startup/scale-up with a strong growth ambition.
At least 5-8 people already employed at the company and plans to significantly scale the organization.
Growing or expected to start growing soon.
📨 How to apply
You can submit the challenge directly through the website. Provide a title that summarizes the challenge. Subsequently, briefly elaborate on your challenge (max. 150 words). Click here for a template you can use or use the AI Challenge Generator (see template).
🗓 Planning
April 2: Deadline for submitting your challenge
March 31 (or sooner): Receiving message if your challenge is approved by the Course Coordinator
April 3-6: Matching phase
April 7: Matches are communicated
April 8-16: Kick-off meeting with your team
May 19, 11:00 – 15:00: Final presentations in time slots of 20 minutes (after you are matched to a team, we will schedule your slot)
We're happy to have you on board 👋
This will happen next 👇
Once you registered your team, get together (offline or online) with your team asap, to discuss which challenges you want to work on and why, and submit this selection. Deadline is April 3.
Subsequently, the participating organizations will rank the teams that want to work on their challenge on April 6.
Finally, our platform will generate and share the team-challenge matches on April 7.
Once you're matched to a challenge, schedule a kick-off meeting with the company representative on April 8-16 (or sooner if you're feeling ambitious). (☝️Use this template). Make sure to prepare for this meeting (e.g. read about the company and the contact person, draft and share an agenda, formulate questions, etc.).
Good luck!