In today’s ever changing and increasingly (digital and more sustainable) business world, the development of new products and services is characterized by shortened development cycles. In order to be able to deal with the challenges of today’s business environment, employees require new skills. The Multidisciplinary Business Challenge (MBC) course aims to introduce students to these skills in a hands-on fashion. Students will work in multidisciplinary teams to solve a real-life business challenge.
In this course, we will use the design thinking methodology in combination with business model generation, lean start-up and effectuation to work on the real-life business challenges. Design thinking is an increasingly popular approach to innovation and operates based on 5 important principles: It’s a specific (1) mind- set, a (2) way of working that drives one to be (3) human-centered, (4) holistic and (5) explorative. This process fosters co-creation in a multidisciplinary set-up, which is fast paced and cyclical and it forces you to make the intangible tangible. Design thinking equips you with a rich toolbox to design the best solutions for your customer by helping you to go from idea to impact in full speed.

In the MBC course we will focus on a variety of skills (entrepreneurial, analytical, presentation, teamwork, and storytelling) and a variety of business frameworks & approaches which will help students to develop their own toolset that they can utilize during their current academic and later on in their professional career.

* Osterwalder A. & Pigneur Y. (2010). Business model generation: a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. John Wiley & Sons. (ISBN 9780470876411).
* Osterwalder A., Pigneur Y., Bernarda G., Smith, A. & Papadakos, T. (2014). Value proposition design: How to create products and services customers want. John Wiley & Sons, 2014. (ISBN 9781118968055).
* Van der Pijl P., Lokitz J., & Solomon L. (2016). Design a better Business: new tools, skills, and mindset for strategy and innovation. John Wiley & Sons. (ISBN 9781119272113).
* Additional articles.

All master International Business students can register themselves for this course through the Student Portal.
Note that there is a limit, and registrations will be handled on a first come, first serve basis. In other words, once the course is full, you will not be able to register for it anymore.