Figure 1. My Business and entrepreneurship development during the Master's.

At the beginning of my master’s journey, I understood Business & Entrepreneurship primarily through stakeholder management. My focus was on identifying relevant actors, understanding their needs, and facilitating collaboration between different groups. Through projects involving municipalities, community members, and organizational partners, I learned how to communicate across diverse perspectives and balance competing interests. At this stage, I viewed successful design largely as the result of effective stakeholder engagement and collaboration.

Organizational Alignment

My collaboration with the municipality of Helmond expanded this understanding. I realized that stakeholder support alone is not sufficient for implementation. Design outcomes must also align with organizational goals, values, and long-term ambitions. Through iterative discussions with municipal stakeholders, I learned to translate design intentions into proposals that could fit existing institutional structures. This experience demonstrated that implementation depends not only on the quality of a concept, but also on its relevance within the organizational context.

Figure 2. Through repeated discussions with the municipality of Helmond, our team aligned design ambitions with organizational goals, increasing the likelihood of future implementation.

Value Co-creation

During my internship at Shimano, my focus shifted toward value creation. Working within a performance-driven industry environment required me to justify design decisions in relation to specific user groups, business objectives, and product development priorities. By recruiting experienced cyclists, collaborating with bike fitting experts, and integrating user insights with technical considerations, I learned to frame project outcomes in ways that were meaningful for engineers, researchers, and decision-makers alike. This experience taught me that design creates value when it helps multiple stakeholders make better-informed decisions.

Figure 3. Collaboration with bike fitters, cyclists, and engineers enabled me to translate user insights into development-relevant knowledge, creating value across multiple stakeholders within Shimano.

Extending Value Beyond Products

My Final Master Project revealed another form of value creation. Building on observations from my Shimano internship, I explored methods for capturing bodily experiences that users often struggle to articulate. Rather than generating another product concept, the project contributed a way of translating tacit user experiences into actionable design insights. Discussions with my internship manager during the Final Demo Day highlighted the potential relevance of this approach for future product development and reinforced the value of design as a tool for generating new forms of user knowledge. The continued interest from both industry and external organizations reinforced my understanding that design value can extend beyond individual projects and create opportunities for future implementation and collaboration.

Design Positioning

Today, I see Business & Entrepreneurship as the ability to strategically position design within larger systems of value creation. Rather than focusing solely on stakeholder management, I aim to understand how design can align with organizational goals, create value across different actors, and remain relevant beyond the duration of a project. This perspective has influenced how I approach both academic and professional projects, allowing me to consider not only what is desirable for users, but also what is viable for organizations and sustainable over time. I became interested in how these methods could evolve into transferable services, frameworks, or innovation opportunities beyond individual projects.