Business & Entrepreneurship

Where I started …

The entrepreneurial mindset has never been completely my thing. During my bachelor’s I tried to gain some awareness of methods to come up with or validate a business case.

Managing multiple stakeholders in a design process started when working with the Eindhoven Marathon in B2.1, a nursery home in B2.2, doing a social design B3.1 internship, and the multidisciplinary B3.2 project with a design studio as client. Although not always aimed at making a business case, managing stakeholders is something I found important to learn to stay in control of a project.

Interdisciplinary Innovation value proposition canvas: here
Report B2.1: here and revised Business Model from Design Innovation Methods course: here
Report B3.1: here

Interdisciplinary Innovation course, learning how to make a value proposition canvas for the student home context.
B2. Business model canvas for the Eindhoven Marathon project
B2.1 winning the Design Marathon competition with our idea to make the Eindhoven Marathon more crowdsourced.
B3.2 with Jelle, the other intern who studied Business Innovation and who taught me a lot about stakeholder management with the projects I was working on.

… how I continued …

My focus became to create knowledge rather than saleable products. So developing a business case is less relevant for me. The aspects of this expertise area that have been relevant to conduct research are keeping up with market and research trends and multi-stakeholder process management.

As a supporter of multi-disciplinary collaboration, I sought to explore the extreme of multi-stakeholder management by doing the Innovation Space project course. The rollercoaster process of reaching out to parties like Philips and the municipality of Eindhoven resulted in a concept design for a holiday park. This process challenged me in reaching out to potential partners which felt like a scary process before, but I learned that really the worst that can happen is a party not being interested.

Innovation Space pitch presentation midterm: here , and final: here

Innovation Space course, the poster of our final concept idea of using light in a fun way on holiday parks.
Innovation Space course, the midterm concept idea of adaptive light fixtures to reduce light pollution.

… and where I’m headed.

In the final master phase I worked with CWI, again an external stakeholder. As they work at the forefront of social VR research, I was able to attend many events that help me stay informed on the hardware trends but also VR companies’ visions.

For my future as design researcher it is important to keep attending these kinds of events. It support me in identifying market gaps and direct my research there. Also, whether in a company or as an independent researcher I want to keep broadening my network to involve more (diverse) stakeholders in my design research processes.

Attending the opening of the AI, Media & Democracy ELSA lab.
Attending the CHI NL event ‘Experience and Beyond’ in which a crossover between companies and academics was made. In this picture a presentation from TNO.
Attending VR Days, an event surrounding all innovations regarding VR hardware and software. Here a panel session of companies working with haptics and sensors.
Attending VR Days, an event surrounding all innovations regarding VR hardware and software. Here a talk by Mel Slater on proxemics in VR.