Business Models Innovation on Student Communities

The global movement of students who travel every year around 6-8 million for study aims is continuous due to its importance and annual growth rate of 10%; this step in a student’s life is critical since it is a career decision. The idea of starting a new life in a new cultural environment might sound attractive; students usually lose interest halfway through. This often happens when the magic of enthusiasm vanishes, and questions start to rise in their minds: How can I handle the paperwork? How can I find a house quickly? How will I deal with foreigners speaking a different language? Are there hidden opportunities? And the thoughts go on and on. The large number of questions generated in the student’s heads makes them hesitate whether they are fit for such a journey, and this is when most of the students decide to quit. From previous experience in the educational consultancy industry, students cannot make the journey independently. It is not a coincidence that most international students know someone abroad or sign a contract with an agency. Indeed, having someone to help is the primary motivation for anyone to consider this opportunity. This brings another question: what about students who would like to study somewhere abroad but don’t know someone or don’t have what it takes to do everything on their own? Or cannot afford what agencies ask for? Unfair opportunities will occur. Some existing models try to solve students’ problems for their journey, but there are many defects. These models couldn’t solve the problem because of limited resources and high-priced services; instead, they made more problems arise. Since a group of students who lack knowledge is losing the opportunity to travel and achieve their dreams, the research objective is to give fair chances to everyone by removing all obstacles that stand in front of a student’s dreams and creating an innovative model for student communities that solve the mainstream problems and the problems that the existing services couldn’t solve. This research aims to create a peer-to-peer platform that links students willing to travel with another student who made the same journey living in the destination city to help during their admission and enrollment procedure, adding to post-travel services. The job is to ensure a concrete platform with perfect management and logistics to let both peers interact smoothly, safely, trusty, and be scalable to contain the worldwide market. Data from the previous experience “Ready4study” were promising; 50+ students got complete services packages. In contrast, 700+ students were interested and contacted by the agency for a free orientation which indicates the demand. Still, instead of having an agency with limited resources, we are proposing a new model that eliminates the limitation of resources and allows people with a low budget to study abroad, as also excellent scalable service. The analysis of the competitors gave a sign that a peer-to-peer platform as the model proposed by this research is not yet provided in the market, which is an advantage. In contrast, the creation of the platform, with all implementation and strategies discussed in the research, will assure a successful innovative method to solve the problem of this research perfectly. The research results answer the study’s question. They suggest that potential investors will take this start-up seriously to make it real, considering that a serious execution will be operated to reach success.