International partnerships
Participation in European consortia increases your impact. Discover our role as a design partner in international collaborations and European programs, where we actively expand our network and initiate new projects.
Launch Game
Entrepreneurship education game
Launch Game is an entrepreneurship education game that 8D is developing further with five European partners under Erasmus+. Students still often learn to start a business from books. In the game, they run a startup in teams and talk to real advisers and investors. In just two hours, they work through the first two years of their fictional startup, from idea to first customers.
Design Objectives:
1
Build one tool for players, experts and facilitators: back end, dashboard, database and interfaces for every user
2
Keep real conversations between students and experts at the centre: an analogue game with a digital layer
3
Make the game usable in different contexts and languages
Interested in an European collaboration?
Sven likes to think along!
Why entrepreneurship teaching needs a game
In higher education, starting a business often stays theory. Students learn about funding and market research, but rarely make a decision with consequences themselves. Contact with people from the startup ecosystem is scarce. Yet that network is often the reason someone actually starts a company.
In the Launch Game, student teams run into everything you face as a founder. Real local experts sit at the table: they give advice, close deals and help pick the winner. During the tests, the partner universities measure how the game affects students’ knowledge of entrepreneurship.
Approach
Next, 8D led an online ‘problemstorm’ with all partners. This is the kick-off session from our methodology in which stakeholders decide together which problem to solve first. The partners quickly agreed on what had to stay: the time pressure, the energy and above all the conversation with real experts. Still, a lot had to change. Experts spent much of their time entering data. Players searched a booklet for information, and the facilitator had no overview of all teams.
Outcome: an education game that keeps growing
The goal is an entrepreneurship education game that teachers in any subject and any country can run themselves.
- Testing phase: one digital tool for players, experts and facilitators, in five languages (back end, lobby system, interfaces, database, server)
- Planned: a training for teachers and a manual for students
- Local tests in the Netherlands, Spain, France and Cyprus
- Planned: an impact study in which two partner universities track what the game does for students
Would you like to take part in one of the tests with your students or as an expert? Then contact Stephan Burghout at stephan@8d.nl.
Research in the midst of society
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Horizon Europe
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