
THE CHALLENGE HUB
The place for modern co-innovation!
Highly relevant business challenges from companies for founders, first customers for their startups, exploration of new technical possibilities for developers, close collaboration with the startup scene for the companies, strengthening its own customer relationships for IBM
– This is what the Challenge Hub is about!
As an online platform the Challenge Hub connects founders, startups and developers with companies and IBM.Digital problems of companies from a broad spectrum of industries are published in form of challenges on the platform. Potential founders and young startups without a valid business idea as well as curious developers can choose a challenge and receive a real world problem to work on. They solve it with the corporate partner as a first client and can scale-up the solution to a new business. The co-innovation is supported by IBM through mentoring of the founders, startups and developers, provision of technical infrastructure and expertise,
plus a broad network.
You want to learn more? Check out our prototype the CHALLENGE HUB!

OUR CHALLENGE
Adoption rate of technology decreasing
More dynamic, complex competition
Continuous portfolio transformation
How can IBM become more attractive to Startups and Developers so that they opt to use its' cloud services and
co-innovate together with IBM to prepare clients for the future?
IMPACT
What is the outcome for all parties?
Co-innovation with entrepreneurs & developers
Enlarged cloud portfolio & usage
Improved response rate to fast changes

Work on real world problems
Chance to scale up to a business
Access to market knowledge & network
Tech support & entrepreneurship mentoring
Innovative, creative solution
Quality assurance by IBM
Investment opportunity
New work spirit

PERSONAS & NEEDS
Key needs - Founders & Startups
Lars, Startup Founder
Market insights
Entrepreneurs are always on the look-out for new inspiration and promising market gaps.
Visibility on the market:
At every stage of the start-up process, founders seek proximity to the market for validation, customer acquisition and market development.
Guidance:
Profiting from the experience of other entrepreneurs and succesful bussineses is highly appreciated in the entrepreneurial community.
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Key needs - Developers
Self-Improvement & Learning
Nothing is more fascinating to techies than a new technology to explore.
Autonomous creativity
In all their business life developers enjoy to develop their own solutions
Appreciation
Developers are often not exposed to the public but search for their own challenges to be acknowledged for.

To develop the final solution for the joint cooperation between entrepreneurs, developers and enterprises out of the work of the preceding six months, we used an iterative approach derived from the design thinking method during the last phase of our project:
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We focused on a user-centric design based on extensive market research and the development of user journeys in the beginning.
In the next step, first solution approaches were mocked. To ensure customers need for the features extensive tests took place. Therefore we used a click dummy of our prototype. Afterwards, the prototype was actually implemented.
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You can visit the click dummy through the link below. To check out the implementation click on "CHALLENGE HUB".
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OUR METHODOLOGY

STUDENT TEAM




Questionnaire
To further improve our offers on the Challenge Hub and include your experience in the startup world we have designed the following questionnaire.
We would appreciate if you could share your point of view: