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).