Use Case

• Students will challenge and disrupt your ideas, they may bring a renewed view on customer needs, market segments and how to access and address them.
• The opportunity to have 2-3 teams working on your same challenge so as to enrich the end-result with different angles.
• Students will apply a robust business analysis methodology consisting of (1) framing the business challenge (with you), (2) choosing appropriate business analysis tools with their supervisors at university (qualitative study), (3) collecting data, (4) interpreting, critically discussing the collected data and providing recommendations.
• The final outcome will consist of a group-report and potentially a presentation (online if not possible F2F), which will present to you a range of ideas and recommendations out of which can be drawn conclusions and offered potential solutions.

This project is a component of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E) study course delivered in the EIT Digital Master School. The provided use case must have a reasonable scope and enough substance to lead to significant results.

• Students must be able to handle their project with a great deal of autonomy (choice of the business analysis tools, decisions in their study, etc.) as this is part of the pedagogical objectives.
• Company needs to assign a contact person who will interact with the students at an agreed-upon frequency. It is of key importance that s/he can help students access relevant information (e.g. by giving a few contacts within/outside your organization(s) from whom the students could collect data) and offer technical advice when necessary.
• In order to achieve the expected results and fully motivate students, we recommend you to avoid:
  • considering students as a resource for low skilled activities (such as heavy data-crunching);
  • asking for any technological development or software coding, as this is not the course’s objective;
  • asking for high-volume of quantitative data collection/analysis, as there is neither room nor time in this course;
  • a strict accounting of their working hours (leave to students some flexibility in managing their time), instead, you will prefer orienting them towards final objective.

The time and sequence of steps remain indicative and can be adapted to specific situations:

• The company representative offers one frontal lecture to all teams working on that case - either through videoconference or face-to-face - so as to create a common understanding of the challenge.
• Within an agreed period of time each team has the right to formulate up to 5 questions for the company. Students have to discuss these questions in advance with the other teams to avoid asking the same question twice.
• Each group has the right to have a mentoring with the company representative for no longer than 2 hours to check the progress made and the potential innovative ideas (F2F or virtually in case of de-localized teams).
• Depending on the availability of the company representative, teams may have another two hours mentoring when finalising their suggestions, prior to writing the group-report.
• The company representative may also participate as member of the jury during the (optional) group presentation (F2F or virtually in case of de-localized teams).

The workload for the company representative through these steps – when working simultaneously with 3 groups – should not exceed 2 working days.