Due to the lack of focus on this expertise area in most first-year courses of Industrial Design, I took significant initiative to develop proficiency in this area during the remainder of my bachelor's. Initially, this entailed being acquainted with customer profiles and value maps, as well as business models, to target the needs and desires of users correctly. However, courses like New Product Marketing and Design Innovation Methods have significantly broadened my perspective on the available strategies for creating value propositions and triggered the realization that business and entrepreneurship go beyond filling canvases. In fact, value propositions can be created through actively developing business cases, using market trends and competition analysis early in the process to serve as guidance, similarly to identifying user and society needs through empathising, in turn enhancing the communication of ideas to stakeholders. Discussing ideas with stakeholders, extensively done in semester projects, also proved effective to both investigate the area of design and validate thus far developed concepts and business models to fit the real world and search for remaining gaps and solutions to address those.

Furthermore, participation in real-life scenarios such as a board year at student Team IGNITE, my internship and participating in design contests like the James Dyson Award, resulted in a more practical acquisition and application of this expertise. Being personally involved in the ins and outs of operating start-ups has exposed me to fundamental business ideas such as entrepreneurship and intellectual property rights, primarily fueled by in-depth innovationSpace lectures on these topics offered while being a board member of a student team. Furthermore, the track Behaviour Change Technologies within the course USE Basics, covered ethical approaches to evaluate organizations and their technologies. All in all, I believe to have acquired a comprehensive skillset consisting of market and user analysis techniques to be able to deliver value to the right user.