Let talented master students help boost the entrepreneurial capabilities and innovation power of your organization.
Innovation is, perhaps, more important than ever for organizations. 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 this challenge master students help boost the entrepreneurial capabilities and innovation power of your organization.
Recommendations are based on a combination of in-depth research within the your organization, external research (if applicable), and the state-of-the-art in the academic literature.
✅ Key features of the challenge
Students per team: 4-5 students
Course: Intrapreneurship
Programme: Master Business Development and Entrepreneurship
No. of hours spent per team: 200 hours
Deliverables: Presentation and report (in the form of slides) with recommendations and an implementation plan.
Company time investment: Your time involvement is 18-24 hours in total (e.g. weekly (short) meetings, interviews, final presentation, etc.)
Matching fee: €850,- (ex tax, charged by Master Challenge (NOT the university))
📑 Challenge Examples
A variety of topics related to corporate entrepreneurship, corporate venturing, intrapreneurship, employee creativity/proactivity are suitable for this challenge. We also accept challenges related to evaluating corporate entrepreneurship or employee innovation programs that have been implemented in the recent past.
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 startup methodologies in large organizations.
How to collaborate with startups? (corporate – startup collaborations).
Improving corporate incubators or venturing programs
Developing a corporate entrepreneurship ecosystem (i.e., with which partners should we collaborate to spur entrepreneurship/innovation?)
Improving idea management systems
Reward systems for intrapreneurship or bottom-up innovation
❗️Topics that relate to marketing, market research, or market development are NOT suitable for this challenge
Read the following blog posts about previous editions of this challenge 👉 IKEA blog post and Team Liquid blog post.
🏢 Requirement for participating companies
Any companies/organizations from any industry can apply
Smaller organizations (> 25 employees) can also submit a challenge provided that these are high growth organizations.
💰 Costs
Master Challenge is organizing this challenge-based learning program free of charge for educational organizations. In order to cover costs like company recruitment, platform development, marketing, coordination, etc. Master Challenge issues a matching fee of €850,- (ex tax). This is to be able to further operate and close the gap between education and practice.
❗️You will only be charged when matched to a team.
👉 What does the challenge ask of you as a company when selected and matched to a team?
A contact person that typically invests between 10-14 hours (e.g., joining the (online) kick-off, (bi-)weekly update meetings, final seminar, providing information, answering questions).
Most assignments require students to collect data within the host organization (e.g., interview data, focus groups, quantitative data). Typically, the data collection requires an additional company investment of about 8-10 hours.
A selection of documents to get the team up to speed. For example, a pitch/slide deck detailing your company’s activities and structure, the problem associated to the challenge, specific questions related to the topic that you might want the students to research for you, trend reports, industry reports, other relevant (research) reports.
📨 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.
🗓 Planning
September 4: Deadline for submitting your challenge
September 5 (or earlier): Receiving message if your challenge is approved by the Course Coordinator
September 8-12: Matching phase
September 15: Matches are communicated
September 17-19: Kick-off meeting with your team (your team will contact you to set up the meeting)
November 3 (10.00-12.00 hours): Final seminar during which the teams present their solutions (on location in Utrecht)
Questions? Want to discuss your challenge before submitting one? Feel free to schedule a call (see "Schedule a call" button).
We're happy to have you on board 👋
Most likely you have been added to a team.
This will happen next 👇
Discuss with your team members which challenges you want to work on and why, and submit this selection. Deadline is September 10. Please note that ONE team member submits the challenge ranking for the whole team.
Subsequently, the participating organizations will rank the teams that want to work on their challenge on September 12.
Finally, our platform will generate and share the team-challenge matches on September 15 (or sooner).
Once you're matched to a challenge, schedule a kick-off meeting with the company representative on September 17-19. (☝️Use this template)
Check out the information slides for some tips and tricks on how to successfully work on this challenge!
In case you have questions about then use of the platform, feel free to use the chat (purple thingy bottom right).