Kickstart your future with the Future Builders Challenge

Future Builders - the community for everyone who is someone or wants to become someone in construction - and Futurepreneurs Dutch Open are proudly presenting the Future Builders Challenge. A challenge and start-up course in one, starting February 16, 2022. Especially for students who want to make an impact in the built environment. Whoever gives the best pitch on Future Builders Day will win six monthly coaching sessions by Pure Birds and WorldStartup. Of course, we can't promise that your start-up will be a success, but it sure gets very close.

How can we build more with less people? How to turn old buildings into something useful again? Can you make a building generate energy? What can we build to survive floods?

Future Builders Challenge – building a better world

During the Future Builders Challenge, students will be working on solving challenges related to Distribution of functions, Energy transition and infrastructure, Future of work and Value of construction. Check out the Nu Bouwen aan Morgen scenarios by Bouwend Nederland for more information on these themes. You can pick a challenge provided by Future Builders or bring your own idea. But only when it has impact on the built environment, the world we live and work in. Application is open for individual students from all fields of study and for teams. Participation is free of charge.

Masterclasses

The programme takes nearly 3 months, in which participating aspiring entrepreneurs get the chance to develop their talent and start a real business. You will get 7 masterclasses and workshops along the way, all online. The programme ends with a presentation of the teams’ ideas and progress on Future Builders Day, March 31. At the end of the programme, a pitch event will be held. The winner will receive a prize, consisting of six coaching sessions in six months provided by Pure Birds and WorldStartup.

Topics we'll cover during our workshops:

Choosing your idea and defining your purpose using the Ikigai method.
Understand the problem, know the problem owner and define the impact.
Define the challenge, analyse trends, ideate, prioritise, choose and assess the best idea.
Understand the infrastructure, identify stakeholders, define your needs, define a strategy to reach them.
Prototype your idea, know what to test, know who to test it with, define test criteria, build your prototype and go out and test.
Launch your project, set your ultimate future ambitions, analyse your current challenges, create a project roadmap and define your way of working.

Who is this for?

This programme is for students who would like to explore important challenges and to learn to kickstart their own or other’s impactful ideas into a business. During the program, participants learn everything about meaningful entrepreneurship from top mentors. If you want to validate your idea and learn about setting up your team, making the first steps in concept development and pitch for a jury, this is the programme for you.

What will you learn from this programme?

Analysing your personal skills and building a team.
Defining your mission, vision and values.
How to ideate, pick the best ideas and transform them in to a concept.
Validating the problem that you want to solve.
Understanding the impact your concept can make.
Analysing trends.
Setup a prototype and test to validate your concept.
Creating a roadmap with short term and long term goals.
Learn how to pitch your story.

Pitch and win post-programme support

At the pitch event, all teams will pitch their ventures to a relevant audience and a jury. The jury will pick a winner, which will get post-programme support to kickstart their start-up. The deliverables for the pitch event are a pitch-deck and a one-pager business story.

About Futurepreneurs Dutch Open

Futurepreneurs Dutch Open is a collaboration between WorldStartup, THRIVE and Pure Birds who all support impactful entrepreneurship. All three companies have supported hundreds of teams and companies in their business development. By participating in this challenge, you gain access to the ecosystem of WorldStartup, Pure Birds and THRIVE, with mentors, experts and ex-directors, impact entrepreneurs, investors and potential customers.

Time & schedule

The programme takes nearly 3 months, with continuous coaching, 6 masterclasses and workshops + a launch and pitch event. Our virtual doors open at 18:15 CET, we start at 18:30 CET. See the following overview with all dates and topics.

Preliminary schedule:

Futurepreneurs launch event
Session #1 “Purpose Definition”
Session #2 “Impact Definition”
Session #3 “Impact Development”
Session #4 “Impact Infrastructure”
Session #5 “Impact Prototype, Run & Test”
Session #6 “Impact Project Launch”
Pitch event

Platform and resources

The Futurepreneurs programme has an online platform hosted by WorldStartup. This platform provides a central communication and resources hub. All sessions will be recorded and distributed at this platform. Session resources or any other related content will be made available to the teams. The communication stream provides the opportunity for teams to chat and support each other throughout the programme.

Sign up now!

There is no cost to participate in the Future Builders Challenge. But it does bring you a lot of knowledge, new ideas and maybe even six coaching sessions in six months towards your own start-up. So, register now.