During our internal hackathon, we come up with an idea to match students looking for the topic of their university thesis and companies that are interested in research in their field.
As every university student in Estonia needs to present a final thesis to finish their BA or MA studies, this platform offered a way to find a practical topic for their final thesis while possibly also earn some extra cash from doing it (which they anyways need to do).
For companies, it offered a cost-efficient alternative to expensive research agencies and enable even smaller companies to get scientific in-depth research.
Resolution: Launching the MVP of the platform within a few days, we got some immediate response from students and a few educational institutions praising the usefulness of the idea. While it took some time for companies to add their ideas (many had not thought about this option before), we soon got some companies and even managed to match a few successful projects.
However, the response from universities was not that enthusiastic – while they approved the idea, they were not helpful in sharing the platform with their students as most of them already had their own systems in place for this kind of matchmaking (with much better profitability for the university).
So while the idea had some traction and potential, the main obstacle is the competitiveness of universities, especially in a small market where few universities gatekeep the market.
We closed the platform after a year from launching it.