Xerius Wondernemerscan

Starting point

Before taking the plunge and embarking on their entrepreneurial journey, a lot of people wonder if they are even cut-out for being self-employed. These thoughts often plant doubt and hesitation in someone’s mind. Even though – according to Nordic research – you can learn 70% of the skills and knowledge needed to be a successful entrepreneur.

So, no, you really don’t have to be blessed with an entrepreneurial gene. With the right support and coaching, everyone can cultivate a winning, business mindset.

Keeping this in mind, Xerius wanted to create a tool where aspiring business owners can test their personality, skills and knowledge, and entrepreneurial mindset. And see how well they score compared to entrepreneurial experts, as well as the areas in which they could use some improvement and training.

For the development of this scan, Xerius counted on the skills of the Blastic team.

The approach

Xerius’ Wondernemerscan is based on 4 years of research by the HOGENT E-lab and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). In this research, they uncovered which knowledge, hard skills and soft skills contribute to successful entrepreneurship.

There are 3 themes for the statements:

• Personality
• Skills and knowledge
• Decision-making

Every statement has 5 options:

• Fully agree
• Somewhat agree
• Neutral
• Somewhat disagree
• Fully disagree

When filling out the scan, every answer holds a specific weight, predetermined by HOGENT. This weight contributes to the calculation of the user’s personal results.

On the Wondernemerscan results page, users see a few different things.

Based on their score, they’ll receive an overview of their strengths and areas of improvement, personalized recommendations and an accompanying graph indicating their result. This graph compares their result (in black) to that of expert-entrepreneurs (in gray).

Users can check the results in the tool itself or get them sent to their inbox. Or they can visit the landing page “Zelfstandige worden” to find an answer to all their questions concerning entrepreneurship.

Techniques & technologies

The full Xerius Wondernemerscan application runs on Azure Service Fabric. A plain configuration file contains the questions and range of answers. The transaction descriptions and guidelines for the visitor are stored on the Xerius Sitecore platform, which we used as a content management platform.

After the user answered all the questions, their answers are then sent to the backend and processed through the scoring algorithm. Apart from the processing, all results will be stored in the SQL database mapped to the email address of the user. Once the result is calculated, it flows back to the front-end for the user to see.

The final result

Blastic developed the Wondernemerscan in close collaboration with Xerius. Xerius had a very clear goal they wanted to reach and provided extensive input and ideas. Blastic executed the development and the technical side of the project.

The result of this project is a straight-to-the-point self-assessment offering the user a clear overview of their business skills and mindset, and how well they’re underway to train their entrepreneurial gene.

Want to see what it looks like? Check out the Wondernemerscan here.