Back to business

This is the second week of the 1st semester here in the University of Twente and things go well: Many students (our International BA in Business Administration program has more than 250 first-year students in its third year from start). Together with the class Marketing for the Industrial Engineering and Management and the Minor Business Administration I have about 400 students to teach in this quarter. The program includes also workshops and guest lectures.
This week we kicked-off the Marketing Assignment: about 70 groups of students from 3 classes will put all their creativity and enthusiasm to work in order to develop the best strategy for the online presence of the Rijksmuseum Twenthe. Traditionally this project is always about online marketing of cultural, non profit institutions: We started with the Acropolis Museum in 2010, in 2011 we had the LVR-Archaelogical Park Xanten in Germany (the ancient Roman city of Colonia Ulpia Traiana) as subject.
Regarding research, our new focus on E-Marketing lays on Co-Innovation: Innovating together with your customers in Social Media platforms. I thought to use the term Social Innovation yet but a Google search indicated that this term is already used for other purposes. So Co-Innovation is the term that my colleagues and myself will use from now on.
The organization of the Social Media Practice congress on the 6th of November is another activity that keeps me busy, we as University of Twente participate in this with a survey that is conducted now aiming at the identification of social media strategies among Dutch firms in the North and East of the country, The "most social" company will receive also the congress award.