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Startup incubation at universities is becoming increasingly important due to their ability to promote entrepreneurship among students and to increase the chance of survival of the created ventures. Moreover, due to the typically longer years of work experience of MBA students relative to other students, MBA students represent a key segment that such programs should target as previous research has shown that experience is a success factor in startup founders. However, there is little research in available literature on how to design startup incubation programs to maximize the participation and success of MBA students.
In this thesis, startup incubation programs at some leading universities around the world is surveyed. The goal is to come up with a framework inspired by the traits, internal or eco-system based, common to the successful university-based startup incubators. By evaluating these success factors with the preferences of MBA students, the thesis proposes certain services or processes that should be considered to design a university-based incubation program for MBA students. The result will be useful to university managers seeking to build an enduring entrepreneurial ecosystem and improve the entrepreneurial support services at their universities, especially for MBA students.
The thesis is composed of two aspects: first and foremost, desk research is conducted to catalogue the support services that are available to student entrepreneurs at some leading university-based startup incubators around the world. Secondly, a case study of part-time MBA students at the Berlin School of Economics and Law (HWR Berlin) is conducted through a survey and series of interviews. The study reveals several interesting results:
• All the studied startup incubators offer comparable basic services including, mentorship, workspace, seminars, funding, network, etc. The key difference is how those services are provisioned and the extent to which they use specific services to differentiate themselves.
• The universities place entrepreneurship at a center stage with the involvement of the universities’ top management and several institutions within and outside the universities, i.e., they build entrepreneurial ecosystems, rather than isolated startup incubation programs.
• The universities leverage their relative strengths or situation in their entrepreneurial support services e.g., technologically oriented universities such as MIT, Technion, NUS and TUM, focus on creating an environment where more innovation is created and on technology commercialization, Stanford University offers remarkable access to Silicon Valley, SETsquared partnership raises the profile of its members by creating critical mass in a regional alliance.
• Stanford University and MIT have diverse programs that give students multiple entry points to the ecosystems and allow the students’ experience to be easily customizable according to their needs.
• The case study showed an improved entrepreneurial self-efficacy (self-confidence) among the MBA students during the period of their MBA studies. Of equal significance, the study also showed a higher degree of improvement among final year students compared to first-year students of the two-year program. This could hint towards a modular design of startup incubation programs for MBA students, with more advanced activities left for the later part of the program.
• The survey revealed the preference of MBA students for a strong network, availability of mentors and coaches, and access to funding at their startup incubation center. A revelation which further strengthens the case for creating ecosystems.
The Alfajor is an Argentine delicacy that shows no limits in its development in the country and abroad. Over the last 140 years, it has managed to conquer the palates of Argentines, Paraguayans, Uruguayans and Chileans as a sweet snack or dessert. Because of this outstanding development, the product captured the interest of Brazilian tourists, who incepted the Alfajor in this vast South-American country. Nowadays, several local and imported Alfajores are commercialised
through this new market. Still, many Brazilians have not heard of the product yet, and there are further challenges that Alfajor companies must overcome in their internationalisation process. This work explores these challenges based on the Uppsala Model, explaining how an intermediary can help overcome the Liability of Outsidership. Moreover, an Alfajor’s Psychic Distance Scale is elaborated to
measure the Liability of Foreignness and how the Food Culture Distance with Brazil can harden the introduction of this product in an unfamiliar market.
Start-up is the term used when you want to turn your business idea into practice. In today's rapidly changing market, new businesses are constantly born, and existing ones are constantly going out of business. This is also a common phenomenon in China's language training and overseas study market. Many factors make a successful start-up, and certainly they have similar characteristics. The study of these common characteristics will greatly increase the chances of successful entrepreneurship. At present, China's language training market is still quite large, mainly because of the large population base. But recent domestic policies on the education and training industry, as well as policies which deal with COVID-19, have added considerable number of risks to the industry. Coupled with the rapidly changing international political environment, which often records negative changes, the overseas study industry is also suffering. This paper aims to identify the key issues and new opportunities of the Chinese language training market and study abroad market through a thorough research. Guided by applying proper management strategies and start-up management concepts to avoid the risk of the existing market in order to establish a new start-up company with a different business model using the knowledge of customers and the market which has been obtained from the market research. A business plan with a three-year financial planning will also be created.
The German startup landscape consists of 75% early-stage startups (Kollmann et al. 2020. Especially young startups face challenges to tap into traditional sources of funding, such as bank loans, because they have little securities to offer and often lack a sufficient business model, as re-occurring inflows are uncertain (Carpenter and Petersen, 2002; Hall, 2002). Venture capitalists are willing to take on higher risk in return for a share of the company and its profits (Caselli and Negri 2018). Additionally, they offer a variety of benefits like network, experience and advice, which is especially interesting for young startups. Since two out of three startups fail to generate a positive return (Eisenmann 2021) venture capitalists have thorough screening procedures before investing. Hence equity investing in early-stage startups has long been an exclusive activity to potent players on the capital market.
Crowd investing platforms like Companisto and Seedmatch have started to change the venture capital landscape, as they allow private persons to invest in startups like a VC in form of equity (Companisto 2021d). This means, that private persons can profit from startup success as soon as they create revenues or when the company is sold.
There are some platforms that aim to match startups and venture capitalists, but little is known about which criteria enable an optimal match. Thus, this thesis went on an endeavor to identify critical success factors, that foster high-quality matchmaking between startups and venture capital investors. Key factors can be divided into two categories. Firstly, soft
factors like trust, sympathy and leadership, which are difficult to depict on a platform.
Secondly, hard factors like investment target, number of customers, positioning and market
relevance. If a platform understands the principles that drive the decision making of startups
and venture capitalists, it can facilitate the deal making and could profit greatly from the
expected network effects. Because startups and venture capitalists would benefit from a
higher matching quality and thus promote the platform’s success.
The global recorded music business is now in its sixth year of consecutive growth since 2015, primarily driven by increasing revenue from music streaming. At the same time, market-leading streaming platform Spotify is accumulating losses, and as a result of the Covid-pandemic, music creators have suffered one of the worst years in modern history due to a loss of income from live performances.
Thus, the revenue from music streaming is of increasing importance, and this has brought up concerns about the equality of its distribution, which were investigated by the DCMS Committee of the British government.
This thesis uses qualitative exploratory methods to analyse the data collected in the DCMS inquiry and answer the research question “Is the user-centric model the solution to more equality in the distribution of income from music streaming services?”. Furthermore, it puts the results in context with the academic literature on platform business frameworks, music streaming revenue models and distribution systems.
The findings suggest that the effects of the user-centric payment system are under-studied, and more in-depth research is recommended. Furthermore, the model’s implementation would depend on a few powerful stakeholders' consent, particularly major labels and publishers. Lastly, the findings indicate that managerial efforts should be focused on increasing the downstream revenue by raising fees for monthly subscriptions rather than the distribution of revenue.