School of Financial Management

In 2010 the School of Financial Management began its own Start-Up Café. It is an initiative to raise the level of entrepreneurship in our student community.

The idea of Start-Up Café is to link physical support services with virtual support into a worldwide network. This means that universities all over the world - involved in Start-Up Café - create a physical café and contribute to the virtual café website for their home country. Each country website is linked to all other Start-Up Café websites. At the moment about 20 institutions in many countries worldwide have signed-up to join Start-Up Café world: from the USA to Thailand, from Finland to South-Africa.

The objectives of the Start-Up Café are:

• to embed entrepreneurship and to raise (international) business awareness;
• to provide a comprehensive service to a range of support services for start-ups.

To reach these objectives we use case studies, best practice business plans, e-network and forum, news items, links to other key websites, link to alumni websites, entrepreneurship toolbox and links to other Start-Up Café websites.

Since 2009 our students go to places all over the world: the United States, Denmark, Canada, Belgium, etc. They are part of a once-in-a-student-lifetime experience. From Monday to Friday they have to solve several real life business cases during the Case Competition. For every case, they have to prepare a solution which has to be presented to a jury.

The competition consists of teams responding to cases or business problems and offering ideas, feedback, and solutions. The teams have four hours to prepare their response to the cases with no outside help. There are several rounds and in every round each team has to compete against another. After both teams have presented, the judges determine a winner. Part of the training is competing in other Case Competitions in Europe, e.g the one in Leuven, Belgium, in October.

Teams who competed in previous competitions include teams from: Bishop's University, Concordia University and Memorial University (all Canadian); Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland; Helsinki School of Economics, Finland; Schools of Financial and Commercial Management, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands; International Business Academy, Denmark; Katholieke Hogeschool Leuven, Belgium; Tennessee Technological University and many, many more.

Students select a service or product that doesn't exist yet and write a business plan. During the project students deal with all financial and commercial elements required to develop a solid business plan using known and new theories. In a kick-off meeting, workshops and consultancy meetings, students acquire the required background and progress information. At the end of the training students present their business plans to a jury consisting of professors from the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and external professionals (usually self-employed), followed by a Q&A session. The best team submits its plan and a short film to the NIBS board to be selected to play against teams from other business schools in a final during the NIBS conference (video-conference in May).