Interview with Playground's Community Manager Bianca Meyer

My name is Bianca Meyer and I work as the Community Manager at Playground, run by the UU Centre for Entrepreneurship. In my role, I make sure that everyone feels welcome at Playground and finds the right resources to get entrepreneurial. 

In my day-to-day work that means I am hosting our offline community—students meeting at Playground—and our online community on WhatsApp. I organize a variety of events, from social lunches to educational workshops and inspirational outings, I collaborate with teachers who host their class here at Playground, and I coach students on small projects, events, or representing Playground as ambassadors to others.  

We aim to make entrepreneurship accessible, active, and fun. For us at Playground, entrepreneurship is broader than just starting a business. It’s about acting on an idea and creating value—financial, sustainable, cultural, or social. We work with the definition based on the European entrepreneurial competency framework called EntreComp.  

We train students from all faculties in the entrepreneurial mindset and skills that are applicable in all sorts of careers. For example, there’s many transferrable communication skills that you need in entrepreneurship to make things happen because you always collaborate with a multitude of stakeholders. Based on this, Playground supports student-driven initiatives through coaching, mentorship, funding (up to €1,000), workshops and events, community, and physical space.  

It’s built in layers. Our core operational team is supported by a student team who helps us run the space. They sit behind the reception and help us with content. We also have a student ambassador team that helps us spread awareness, and we now have our first group of interns doing an entrepreneurial internship at Playground. 

Beyond that, we’re building a mentor network. These are people with industry experience who come back to the university to help students with their ideas. They ask the right questions and have the right network. That really helps active projects move forward. We connect mentors with students who are at a stage where that support fits. 

We also work in the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem: the startup incubator, the Knowledge Transfer Office, and the regional network ROM. We help students navigate where to go next. 

It looks like curiosity and the courage to do something about an idea. That idea can come from your own life or it can come from a course, especially in the humanities or social sciences, where students get trained to look at societal problems. 

A recent example: a student team in the Foundations of Social Sciences for Sustainability course decided to work on increased sustainability in everyday life. They designed park benches with plant pots attached to them. They’re now taking this idea further, talking to the city, and doing a trial at Drift. That’s a good example of actually doing something about an idea. 

These kinds of initiatives are bottom‑up, driven by students’ vision of, “Hey, we could create a small change.” And by doing that, they also shape themselves. So not only do they drive their initiative, such as the park bench project, but they also learn what they are capable of, and that perspective of growth they take into any future initiative. 

We make it personal. Even though we’re growing fast, we know who’s coming in. People need to feel encouraged, seen, and heard. Starting something can be scary, so personal connection matters. 

This spreads like a ripple effect. Our student team interacts with visitors the same way we do. The shared excitement and the feeling of “I can do this” brings people together. 

The biggest challenge is getting started. We gently push them out of their comfort zone. For example, if you want to create something for the elderly, you need to talk to the elderly. Don’t stay in your head. 

Another challenge is finding the right people. We help students by setting up initial connections or pointing them in the right direction. Once those conversations start, insights follow, and then they can brainstorm solutions and move forward. 

I do think that each individual story can be – in a way – a case study for research. And it would be interesting to see if there are patterns in student initiative behaviour. If there are certain criteria that make them more successful, or if there are barriers that are holding them back.  

We’ve done design research into Playground and its services. We keep doing action‑based research: we do something, evaluate it, and decide the next steps. But there’s definitely room for more research. 

The design research that we’ve done was asking the question: “Is this one‑size‑fits‑all? Can you design a pre‑incubation space like Playground based on literature?” And we found that the basics are there: from modularity in spatial design to sense of community and facilitation of knowledge exchange—both social and educational. So, what we do at Playground is very much in line with research. 

However, our work highlights the importance of need-based design—so from the people that you’re doing this for—and taking these insights into decisions of how you’re addressing their needs. That’s also what we teach our students to do, because that’s the core of entrepreneurship: never build something that no one needs; build something that really solves someone’s problem. And that’s what we’re doing with Playground as well. Our numbers show it works: full education sessions, over 200 students in our community, 100 coached students, and very happy users. If you stay close enough to the people that you want to support, then you can support them well. And we are happy to see that theoretical insights work out in practice. 

It’s good to clarify that our services are primarily targeted at students and PhD candidates. For them, we organize a monthly onboarding where we talk about what it means to be entrepreneurial. Afterwards, participants get full access to our online community. The onboarding is followed by lunch, which is a great moment to talk to people, feel the atmosphere, and hear about projects. When people receive funding, we have an award ceremony during the lunch, where you hear pitches and see what others are working on. The next onboarding and lunch are on Wednesday 13^th of March. You can find more info on our website. 

If you are reading this as a teacher, we can always sit together and see - based on our expertise in entrepreneurship and related topics like marketing, finance, pitching, teamwork, and design thinking - whether we can contribute with a workshop or talk for a course. You can also request our space for your own innovative education or session. 

If you like what we do, you are always welcome to contribute your expertise directly. For example, a patent attorney regularly sits here for a day and is approachable for students who have questions on the topic. 

For research, it’s still unexplored ground. It would be great to meet and see what we can learn from each other and whether we can set something up that’s mutually beneficial. I’d be curious to be contacted by people who find this initiative interesting and want to explore collaboration.