RSM Space Business Challenge 2023: 39 students, 8 challenges

Every year the RSM Space Business Challenge takes place on campus. The programme is about innovation and entrepreneurship in dynamic ecosystems such as the space sector. The students excel in offering new business and marketing ideas to their ‘clients’. This year, local and ESA BIC companies offered challenges, resulting in 8 challenging projects for the 39 participating students. The final presentations took place on 3 March at SBIC. An inspiring 2 days every March where multiple space tech organisations can join with their own business challenge!

The space business challenge is part of the Honours BSc programme of the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University. The programme is about innovation and entrepreneurship in dynamic ecosystems such as the space sector, the horticulture sector, and Silicon Valley. The programme bundles ambitious and smart Bachelor students who are interested to learn more about the space sector and who can offer a fresh perspective on current business challenges. The challenges revolve around providing business advice to stakeholders and local initiatives on NL Space Campus. These stakeholders include space agencies, R&D institutions, incubation centres, start-ups as well as established companies and other space-related organisations.   

Assignments that student teams are invited to work on included:

• Analyzing business opportunities in space and non-space markets
• Developing market communication strategies for different customer groups.
• Helping stakeholders tweak their business model
• Developing ideas on how to provide more value to customers
• Collecting best practices from other industries

This year’s challenges were offered by Soilspect, Stellar Space Industries, Spherical Systems, HDES R&D, Revolv Space, Marmoris, Groundstation Dotspace and Metalot. The students also received more info about how to work in the space sector from ESA ESTEC, SBIC Noordwijk, ESA BIC and the ESA Technology Broker NL (managed by SBIC and NL Space Campus).  Students work in teams and at the end of the second day the student teams present their ideas and recommendations. 

For two days they worked with ambition and support from the challenge owners as their client, focussing on providing a solution that could benefit their ‘client’. The results every year are always surprising and bring new insights to challenge owners. Business students bring new questions and perspectives into the current marketing plans and business cases offered. For example, new ideas were shared about bringing a new product from Stellar Space Industries widely to the converter market, due to the shortage of the product and therefore the large potential of that market. Or bringing the potential of creating energy from iron powder to wind farms, finding a new market for the ‘client’. Presenting their solutions in a neat way on stage, the students offer new marketing and business potential for every challenge owner. 

Do you want to offer a space business challenge in the future to second-year bachelor students studying business? Reach out to rolie@rsm.nl to join next year’s challenge as a challenge owner!