The top 5 benefits of participating in sustainable venturing challenges

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.