Research

The Founder Monitor.

We gain insight into what founders actually need to scale - and feed it straight back into the campus, the labs and the programmes. Evidence, not anecdote.

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What the research shows
72%
of founders say access to network is their #1 growth lever
800
employees now working across campus ventures
2×
faster market entry reported by scale-ups in our Labs
What we track

Four lenses on who becomes a founder

The Founder Monitor is the annual research programme of Unknown University of Applied Sciences. It follows how entrepreneurship develops over time and which factors decide who ends up starting a company.

  • Education & alumni ActiveWhich programmes and institutions actually produce founders, measured through alumni data.
  • Geographical influence UpcomingRegional differences and the effect of the startup ecosystem around a school.
  • Macro-economic trends UpcomingHow economic conditions move the willingness to start a business.
  • Policy & regulation UpcomingWhat public policy does to founder behaviour.
How we measure it

Half a million alumni, five years on

Through AlumniScan we analyse roughly 500,000 alumni profiles and check who carries a founding role — founder, owner, venture builder — five years after graduation. Long enough for a first venture to be real, early enough to see what education did.

The next step is the Founder Monitor Index: a ranking of Dutch public and private institutions on the entrepreneurial outcomes of their graduates. Schools can join as data partner and see where they stand.

Open the Founder Monitor →
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