Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
- 💡 Background
- 🦾Who We Are
- 🎯 Goals
- 🧠 Topics of Interest
- 🎓 Profile
- 📚 Further Reading
- 📄 Requirements to any Work
- 📬 How to Apply
💡 Background
You want to become an entrepreneur and start your own company but struggle to find suitable ideas? There exists an analytical approach that might help you: Ideation Frameworks. They are heuristics that can help you to identify interesting, unsolved problems in the world that may turn into great startups. Here is a list with 11 ideation frameworks and examples of their real-world applications:
- Unbundling large service: offer only a small set of features of a large/bloated service.
- Hypothesis/trend driven: jump on general trends or personal hypothesis. Example hypothesis: every service will move to the cloud: Photoshop -> Figma, Final Cut Pro -> veed.io (successful bootstrapped business, 270k/mo, video editor in the cloud). Example trend 1: elderlies will use smartphone/internet services more often: build products to educate them on how to use modern cloud software. Example trend 2: BEV will be 100% of car sales in 2030, BEV need to be charged everywhere —> find a solution that tackles a certain problem in this space. Example trend 3: People in Europe and the US will become older and their digital-first children will co-manage their life for them
- Copy an expensive product and offer it cheaper. It works surprisingly well for some. Here is a twitter thread about that framework: https://twitter.com/joshua_hornby/status/1372937943543808005
- Start building something -> discover pain point on the way. This framework is based on personal experience. I often struggle to come up with good ideas when I am standing in front of a whiteboard. But when I make my hands dirty executing a project, I discover new pain points everywhere.
- Collaborate with people with an existing audience. Most businesses fail because they can’t find customers and not because their product doesn’t solve the problem. You can overcome this issue when you collaborate with someone who already has a large audience.
- Follow the money. Analyse flow of money between/within companies & countries ⇒ money sink = opportunity
- Serendipity. Bring yourself into a position where you are exposed to new pain points. E.g. go to a trade fair for boat sellers or go or help friends renovating their apartment
- Change existing products and tailor it for another target group. Example: tailor Airbnb to large enterprises customers (change billing etc.)
- Regulatory change: What regulatory changes exist that can allow new business models. What do we need to do in order to push for regulatory change (e.g. TeleClinic, digital recipes for medication).
- Copy cat & global arbitrage using an existing product: simplify it and bring it to a new market. ⇒ iPhone → cheap phone in Africa
- Turn an old and mediocre service / product into some simple & digital solution (bad online broker → Trade Republic; Stromvertrag ) - Tap, Tap, Shop/Get/do
Example: Google Analytics -> plausible.io, SAP -> Personio. Podcast for more details: https://castro.fm/episode/8SgGuI
🦾Who We Are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused on research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership, and Teams. We are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies, and organizations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
- Research the ideation frameworks intensively
- Find furher examples for each ideation
- Visualize your results by creating a slide deck with one slide for each of the 11 Ideation Frameworks including 2-3 examples
- Analyse which of the frameworks are the most promising ones
🧠 Topics of Interest
- Entrepreneurship in general
- Finding innovative ideas
- Enhancement of structured and critical thinking
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Enthusiasm for career entrepreneurship / starting your own company / creativity / venture capital
- Ability to do sophisticated internet, desk research, and connect with practitioners
- Passion to learn more about the future and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside the university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to Apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!