Bedrijfskunde Services

Deze track biedt een diepgaande academische verkenning van ondernemerschap als een proces van innovatie, nieuwe waardecreatie en organisatorische transformatie. De track onderzoekt hoe ondernemers kansen signaleren en benutten, hoe zij innovatie aanwenden voor de ontwikkeling van duurzame businessmodellen, en hoe zij groei en verandering sturen binnen zowel startende als gevestigde ondernemingen. Studenten verwerven theoretische inzichten en praktische competenties die hen in staat stellen de complexiteit van ondernemerschap effectief te navigeren in dynamische en veranderlijke bedrijfsomgevingen.

Deze track omvat de onderstaande vakken. Meer informatie over de vakken volgt later.  

BK3T1101 Bouw een succesvolle onderneming (5)

This course is designed to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and mindset to develop and grow entrepreneurial ventures. Building on the foundations of strategy, marketing, and finance acquired in earlier years, this course emphasizes the entrepreneurial process from opportunity recognition to scaling, funding, and exit.

The course follows the venture lifecycle, combining theoretical perspectives with practical tools that entrepreneurs use to navigate uncertainty and resource constraints. Students will explore how startups test and refine their ideas through the lean-startup method, how they launch and position themselves in competitive markets, and how they build legitimacy despite the liabilities of newness and smallness. Special attention is given to funding strategies ranging from bootstrapping to early revenue generation and to exit decisions as part of long-term entrepreneurial strategy.

Beyond commercial ventures, the course also highlights the role of entrepreneurship in the social space, analyzing how social enterprises emerge and how they balance financial viability with social impact.

By the end of the course, students will have developed a holistic understanding of the entrepreneurial journey and be prepared to critically apply frameworks to their own venture projects.

Learning goals

1. Understand and explain the main funding challenges encountered by small business.
2. Design launch strategies for new products by small- and medium-sized firms.
3. Analyze how challenges of growth are uniquely impacted by the dual priorities of financial sustainability and social impact in social enterprises.

BK3T1102 Opschaling en verandering (5)

Navigating organizational change is a fundamental theme in the social sciences. Its relevance for managers grows with challenges that arise from coping with competitive markets, shifting societal values, and evolving technologies. As you assume greater responsibilities in your career, you will need to drive necessary change in your organizations. You as potential leaders must, with increasing urgency, encourage other people to engage with change. Yet, this is easier said than done as exemplified by high numbers of initiatives failing to produce the intended results in practice. The necessity for managing change seems obvious, theories and tools for navigating change are elusive. The objective of this course is, hence, to explore concepts that help us to understand how change works in organizations. In the course, we will build on current theories and discuss how six interrelated processes — scoping, envisioning, diagnosing, mobilizing, institutionalizing, and valuing — may help to better think through the complexity of organizational change. Taken together, the course aims to provide students with important concepts to think about change and enable them to develop an evidence-based mind-set on managing change. This course completes the business developer track.

1. Understand and explain core theories and models in the area of organizational change (content-related)
2. Differentiate and apply concepts related to the diagnosing, envisioning, assessing, designing, and intervening processes during organizational change (skill-related)
3. Adopt an evidence-based mindset to design recommendations to navigate change in organizations (attitude-related)

BK3T1103 BSc Project Ondernemen voor groei (7)

The core of the project is research, and what type of research will vary by track. The Bachelor Project follows all steps of a research cycle: A managerial problem, a knowledge question, review of evidence, research design, data collection, data analysis, answer to the question, recommendation to management. “Management” should be read as “stakeholder from practice”. The outcome can be a design, hypothesis test, conceptual framework, and in all cases is translated into an answer to a managerial problem. The data can be quantitative or qualitative, primary or secondary, empirical or simulated.

To successfully complete the Bachelor Project, we assume that students participate in the course Advanced Research Skills (ARS, previously ARM, B3101) in parallel or have already completed this course. Moreover, we assume that students have active knowledge of the concepts covered in Research Project (BT2103) or Onderzoeksproject (BK2103). Lastly, the course builds on a lot of knowledge that you should have acquired in previous methods-related courses (e.g., statistics, mathematics). It is your responsibility to dust off this knowledge. Look at material from these courses when things are not top of mind. Do not expect your supervisor to act like a tutor on such topics.

Learning goals

1. Collect and critically assess academic and professional literature on a specific topic
2. Write a critical synthesis of the academic and professional literature
   
3. Identify a relevant managerial problem and translate the managerial question into a research question
   
4. Design a research project that can be executed in the available timeframe
   
5. Collect and analyse data that is needed to answer the research question
   
6. Present research results and defend the choices made
7. Critically evaluate and discuss research results