Harnessing the power of collaboration: Eurofiber and the Amsterdam Business School

Successful collaboration with students during a challenge-based course

Amsterdam Business School (Image: Jordi Huisman)

Courses and challenges are always opportunities for students and teachers to think outside the box and give more room for creativity, especially when working in multinational and multidisciplinary teams.

The students of the "Organization Design for the 21st Century" course, part of the MSc Business Administration at the Amsterdam Business School, enthusiastically undertook such a project. They were motivated by the opportunity to tackle a genuine and tangible problem that directly pertained to Eurofiber's activities, adding an extra level of complexity to their work. Connected by the initiative of Annabel Murphy, who coordinates the Living Case Lab, this collaboration was successful and helpful for all parties involved.

We had a discussion with Dr. Taghi Ramezan Zadeh, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business in the Section Strategy & International Business, and Martin Vos, Director of Business Innovation at Eurofiber. Assistant Professor Ramezan Zadeh supervised students during the challenge. Martin was the key contact at Eurofiber and was involved in many collaborations between the UvA and Eurofiber in the past.

Technology, sustainability and efficiency at the heart of the challenge

Eurofiber, which monitors and installs optic-fiber networks, is known for its network with over 36,000 customer connections in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany and its eleven data centres in the Netherlands and France. One of Eurofiber's current challenges is to make its data centres more sustainable. As Martin Vos points out, despite their limited size compared to some mega data centres, these infrastructures require almost constant cooling and ventilation. The challenge for Eurofiber is to use the Netherlands' growing capacity for green and renewable energy production to reduce its energy and environmental impact. He explains: "The Netherlands produce considerable amounts of renewable energy, be it solar or wind energy for example. However, rural grids where the energy is often produced are not able to absorb too much energy. If we put a data centre there, it can absorb it, and send the data to a city like Amsterdam. The question now arises: how can we move the data to where the green energy is produced in excess at a precise moment?”

A complex and wicked problem, interesting from an educational point of view, as Professor Taghi Ramezan Zadeh develops. “The challenge here was to design an organization for an ESG-committed partnership that aimed to construct data centres. Student groups were tasked with solving the challenge presented by Eurofiber. This challenge encompassed a range of issues, including organizational, technological, and social aspects, making it a multifaceted problem for students to address. Within our course, we educate students on the principles of design thinking, which are highly applicable to intricate and challenging problems like this one. The Eurofiber case was a prime illustration of a complex issue businesses face. Following six weeks of intensive work on the case, which involved delivering presentations and engaging in Q&A sessions with company executives, the students devised six distinct organizational solutions”, he explains.

Students working on an assignment (Image: Suzanne Blanchard)

Positive outcomes: the impact of high involvement

Professor Ramezan Zadeh describes the challenge’s very positive outcomes, thanks to high involvement from all parties: “What I found particularly interesting in this case was the company's remarkable responsiveness to students' inquiries. They granted them access to their platform and established a dedicated MS Teams channel, allowing the students to freely communicate any questions or concerns they had directly with the company's senior managers. This level of commitment was noteworthy, especially considering the demanding schedules of these senior managers. Undoubtedly, this profoundly impacted the quality of the final outcomes, as the students recognized the company's genuine dedication to resolving the issues at hand. As a result, they strived to ensure their projects were executed with the utmost professionalism. Due to their diverse interests, the challenge at hand revolved around the difficulty of getting all their numerous stakeholders on board with the chosen solution.

Consequently, students presented various solutions to Eurofiber, one of which involved incentivizing customers and raising their awareness about the significance of green data centres. One group's proposed solution was the introduction of a green data centre label. Other solutions focused on engaging political parties, marketing strategies, or addressing technological aspects of the problem. Each group approached the issue from different angles, providing valuable insights that proved beneficial to the company. The executives were very surprised, positively surprised! They seemed to really like the solutions students came up with.

Students really liked this project: the fact that it was a real and complex problem to tackle motivated them. They learned a lot about teamwork, and problem-solving strategies, and liked the method. We received 100% positive evaluations for the course, so that is extremely positive on the educational side as well!”

 “I can look back at a couple of very interactive sessions with lots of enthusiasm and participation from students, resulting in a series of presentations with concrete approaches to the challenge I formulated earlier. After this successful experience, we invited interested students to have a tour in one of our data centres”, confirms Martin Vos from Eurofiber.

Future challenges and new partnerships

Collaborations between students of the University of Amsterdam and external partners are also an opportunity for students to become acquainted with those organisations, and to immerse themselves in their current challenges and corporate culture for a few weeks. These projects sometimes lead to internships and long-term job placements: an opportunity for the partner company to meet a pool of young talent and for the students to have privileged contact with teams and activities that may prove interesting.

Would you like to know more? Is your organisation facing a challenge that could benefit from our students' insight and analysis?

The course will renew this successful experience in the next years, with existing and new UvA partners. For more information and to collaborate with the Roeterseiland Campus Faculties, contact Annabel Murphy from the Living Case Lab at  livingcaselab-eb@uva.nl

We kindly thank Annabel Murphy, Taghi Ramezan Zadeh and Martin Vos for their contribution to this article.