Inform & Prepare

Select a challenge format suited to your company’s needs

Providing a challenge to students requires thorough preparation and planning. This entails becoming familiar with the challenge-based learning approach and getting to know the different features of sustainable venturing challenges. The following dimensions provide guidance as you decide on and select the right format for your company’s needs:

Providing a sustainable venturing challenge to university students can be energising for business partners and educators alike. However, given that it comprises a high level of co-creation, it requires additional effort in terms of involvement and time. During the challenge activity or programme, you will engage in multiple roles and it is important to develop a good understanding of what these individual roles entail:

You will be responsible for representing your company in academia, both to university staff and students. Acting as intermediary between your company management and the university, you engage in managing and maintaining the challenge process, ensuring smooth collaboration and communicating expectations on both sides.

Coach

Given the co-creational nature of challenges, you work side-by-side with students to develop a solution to your business problem. As you do so, you provide the students with expert knowledge linked to your specific field and give input on company- and industry-related topics. Besides engaging in direct discussion, you might also provide supplementary data and methodological insights, if useful for advancing the challenge process.

Mentor

As the students get to know the business problem you are facing and begin to develop new ideas, it will be important to provide them with support and the right tools along the way. Sharing your experience and giving insights into project management and planning, proper time management and delegation as well as communication and negotiation will provide them with necessary guidance and help to boost their motivation for solving the challenge.

Jury member and assessor

At the end of the challenge, it will be your task to evaluate the student ideas and solutions and check their potential for implementation at your company. Usually, this takes place in the form of a final pitch event. Here, the academic staff will ensure that all materials and systems necessary for you to fulfil your role as jury member are provided.

Connect & Co-design

Scout for suitable academic partners

Finding a suitable academic partner largely depends on the business problem you want to provide and how you envision to engage in the challenge process. But where to get started with your search for universities suitable for cooperation, in the first place? There are several possible ways to scout for the right academic partner:

Once you have identified a potential university partner, there are several key criteria that should be considered and cross-checked, and which, if met, lay the foundation for building a solid partnership, including:

Once you have identified a suitable academic partner, you should enter into discussion to discuss key requirements and together, begin to prepare the challenge. To ensure successful collaboration, the following topics should form the basis for discussion:

Implement & Reflect

Implement the challenge programme or activity following the different stages of the challenge process

Student-business challenges in sustainable venturing will typically feature the stages shown below. In each of these stages, companies and academic staff are involved to a varying extent. As a business partner, your input during the kick-off of the challenge format is extremely important for setting the stage and making sure that students can develop a sense of motivation and take ownership of the challenge they derive from your business problem. This includes supplying material which includes information on your company activities, structure and strategy, as well as background information about the problem associated with the challenge. You might also include information on your expectations to the students and pose specific questions related to the topic that you want the students to investigate for you. Academic staff will provide student guidelines which detail the planned challenge procedure and the expected role of students, academic staff and the business partner.

The assessment and evaluation will be managed by academic staff to a large extent, but will involve your support to assess and evaluate the outcomes of the challenge. This will ensure that all involved can grasp the impact of their commitment and in the case of continued collaboration, improve the challenge activity or programme with regard to efficiency and effectiveness.

If you would like to measure and improve the impact of your challenge activity or programme, the “Guidelines for the evaluation of collaborative student-business venturing activities” are a suitable resource. The manual is aimed at both company managers and academic staff and introduces approaches to make transparent the costs, benefits as well as the outputs, outcomes and impacts of student-business collaboration schemes in sustainable venturing. It also shows how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing teaching and learning schemes, and provides insights on how to improve and develop them further.

Sustainable venturing challenges come in different formats – from competitions and creathons to ideation workshops and full-semester courses. At their core, they provide a great opportunity for students from all study levels to work collaboratively and develop sustainable solutions to real-world problems with support from corporate and academic mentors. As a participating student, you benefit from this experience in many different ways:

Taking part in a sustainable venturing challenge enables you to experience new ways of learning at university. Going beyond traditional learning formats, you get to directly interact with and learn from professionals who are at the forefront of innovation and sustainable business development in their companies and who would like to work with you at eye-level to develop your solutions to their corporate challenges. In this way, you get to learn about how to integrate innovative, sustainable ideas into existing business models or transform ideas into viable sustainable ventures, whilst also receiving the opportunity to immediately apply your new learnings into practice.

Besides valuable learnings about how to develop and implement eco-innovations and start a new green business, you also get to expand important competencies needed for 21st century learning such as collaborative working, communication, and critical as well as creative thinking. These are crucial skills to build along your student journey and can help you further succeed in your studies, boost your career readiness and help you achieve your professional goals.

Throughout the challenge process, you get to meet and interact with people from all over the world. Working in multidisciplinary and international teams will help you cultivate an open mindset, build your intercultural skills and allow you to exchange different perspectives and ideas with other students as well as academic and company staff – all indispensable in today’s global and interconnected world.

By connecting with leading companies and working in direct exchange with company staff, you receive exposure to entrepreneurial careers and role models at an early stage in your studies. This can help you expand your professional network and increases your chances of gaining further practical experience in the future, such as internships, master thesis projects, or even employability when it comes to starting your career.

By partnering directly with companies and leading professionals to work on their existing challenges, you learn how to design and develop solutions such as new services, products and processes that have the potential to contribute to sustainable change on a local to global scale. In this way, you can make a real impact in the world as a university student. Highly innovative student teams receive the opportunity to further develop and implement their solutions, with the founding of start-ups and spin-offs being a possibility.

While companies and higher education institutions have different missions, structures and working cultures, there is great potential to generate mutual benefits through effective collaboration. Especially challenge-based learning offers an innovative approach to go about developing and implementing your university partnership and can bring many benefits for your company:

Turn a business problem you’ve identified into an opportunity by working together with university students excited to bring new ideas to your company. As a challenge provider, connecting to international students from a wide range of disciplines will allow you to receive different perspectives and fresh insights on sustainable business development. The knowledge and skillset that students and faculty provide can significantly help your company champion eco-innovation and advance sustainable business development. As a start-up, the cooperation can boost your incubation, acceleration and growth processes. In general, collaborating with students can help you employ more critical perspectives and might even inspire more creativity in your day-to-day work.

Collaborating with higher education institutions in challenge-based learning formats can form a strategic component of your sustainable innovation processes – especially when forging long-term partnerships. You benefit from receiving continuous access to the latest scientific advances and absorbing new knowledge and academic researchers’ leading expertise. Tapping into this wealth of knowledge and academic foresight also presents an advantage in that it helps you keep abreast of the larger-scale developments that will impact your sector specifically and the economy as a whole. In essence, you enter a two-way partnership in which both sides reap the benefits: while academics seek your business input to help solve real world problems and advance their research, you get the opportunity to increase your sustainable business success through accessing leading innovation and research and developing your internal capabilities and resources. Besides, you get to grow your network of trusted partners with whom you might discover and develop new formats and channels to drive science-industry collaboration.

By the time the challenge-based activity reaches its end, you are left with an array of new sustainable solutions to your business problem. Where used, these solutions hold the potential to rethink and transform your approach to sustainability and increase the positive impact your business activities generate for the environment and society. This can help you further maximise your impact, strengthen your reputation and build more trust among your customers. Other companies might be inspired to follow suit, encouraging more impact through collaboration between the higher education and business communities.

University collaboration can enhance company leader and employee development. As a company representative, working with students and academic staff can help you improve existing competencies and skills such as cooperation and communication with external actors. It can also stimulate you in terms of developing new knowledge and perspectives on sustainable venturing, and even reinvigorate your passion for innovation. The collaboration not only benefits employees directly involved in the challenge: a company-wide showcase of the results of your collaboration can provide other employees the opportunity to learn from the insights and ideas generated. This can serve as a source of inspiration for their own work and respective business field which in turn benefits the company’s learning culture and overall organisational development.

Higher education institutions are an important source of future employees. Working as challenge provider is a good way to build your employer brand and improve your visibility among the next generation of business leaders and sustainability innovators. You can get in touch with students directly who, after their studies, will potentially bring a wealth of new knowledge and skills into your company as new employees. Going beyond acquiring talent for graduate employment, developing and taking part in sustainable venturing challenges can also help you gain talent for internship placements, thesis projects and part-time student employment.